rmdir(),rename(): do shrink_dcache_parent() only on success

We should've done that call right *after* successful ->rmdir(). That reduces contention caused by tree-walking in shrink_dcache_parent() and, especially, contention caused by evictions in two nested subtrees going on in parallel. The same goes for directory-overwriting rename() - the story there had been parallel to that of rmdir().

Once upon a time ->rmdir() instances used to check if victim inode had more than one (in-core) reference and failed with -EBUSY if it had. The reason was race avoidance - emptiness check is worthless if somebody could just go and create new objects in the victim directory afterwards.

With introduction of dcache the checks had been replaced with checking the refcount of dentry. However, since a cached negative lookup leaves a negative child dentry, such check had lead to false positives - with empty foo/ doing stat foo/bar before rmdir foo ended up with -EBUSY unless the negative dentry of foo/bar happened to be evicted by the time of rmdir(2). That had been fixed by doing shrink_dcache_parent() just before the refcount check.

At the same time, ext2_rmdir() has grown a private solution that eliminated those -EBUSY - it did something (setting ->i_size to 0) which made any subsequent ext2_add_entry() fail.

Unfortunately, even with shrink_dcache_parent() the check had been racy - after all, the victim itself could be found by dcache lookup just after we'd checked its refcount. That got fixed by a new helper (dentry_unhash()) that did shrink_dcache_parent() and unhashed the sucker if its refcount ended up equal to 1. That got called before ->rmdir(), turning the checks in ->rmdir() instances into "if not unhashed fail with -EBUSY". Which reduced the boilerplate nicely, but had an unpleasant side effect - now shrink_dcache_parent() had been done before the emptiness checks, leading to easily triggerable calls of shrink_dcache_parent() on arbitrary large subtrees, quite possibly nested into each other.

Several years later the ext2-private trick had been generalized - (in-core) inodes of dead directories are flagged and calls of lookup, readdir and all directory-modifying methods were prevented in so marked directories. Remaining boilerplate in ->rmdir() instances became redundant and some instances got rid of it.

In 2011 the call of dentry_unhash() got shifted into ->rmdir() instances and then killed off in all of them. That has lead to another problem, though - in case of successful rmdir we *want* any (negative) child dentries dropped and the victim itself made negative. There's no point keeping cached negative lookups in foo when we can get the negative lookup of foo itself cached. So shrink_dcache_parent() call had been restored; unfortunately, it went into the place where dentry_unhash() used to be, i.e. before the ->rmdir() call. Note that we don't unhash anymore, so any "is it busy" checks would be racy; fortunately, all of them are gone.

We should've done that call right *after* successful ->rmdir(). That reduces contention caused by tree-walking in shrink_dcache_parent() and, especially, contention caused by evictions in two nested subtrees going on in parallel. The same goes for directory-overwriting rename() - the story there had been parallel to that of rmdir().

Signed-off-by Al Viro <[email protected]>

---

fs/namei.c +1 -3

index 186bd2464fd5..269b64a1121a 100644
@@ -3847,11 +3847,11 @@ int vfs_rmdir(struct inode *dir, struct dentry *dentry)
 	if (error)
 		goto out;
 
-	shrink_dcache_parent(dentry);
 	error = dir->i_op->rmdir(dir, dentry);
 	if (error)
 		goto out;
 
+	shrink_dcache_parent(dentry);
 	dentry->d_inode->i_flags |= S_DEAD;
 	dont_mount(dentry);
 	detach_mounts(dentry);

@@ -4434,8 +4434,6 @@ int vfs_rename(struct inode *old_dir, struct dentry *old_dentry,
 		    old_dir->i_nlink >= max_links)
 			goto out;
 	}
-	if (is_dir && !(flags & RENAME_EXCHANGE) && target)
-		shrink_dcache_parent(new_dentry);
 	if (!is_dir) {
 		error = try_break_deleg(source, delegated_inode);
 		if (error)

Quoted 5 lines

	if (!(flags & RENAME_EXCHANGE) && target) {

fs/namei.c +2 -1

-		if (is_dir)
+		if (is_dir) {
+			shrink_dcache_parent(new_dentry);

			target->i_flags |= S_DEAD;

Would it be better to set S_DEAD on the removed directory before shrink_dcache_parent() is called (here and in vfs_rmdir()), or is there no way for a new dentry to be added to the parent after the shrink is done?