Re: [RFC PATCH v3 0/9] Suppress negative dentry

[Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>]

On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 7:27 AM Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 3:53 AM Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 2020-05-15 at 15:20 +0800, Chengguang Xu wrote:
> > > This series adds a new lookup flag LOOKUP_DONTCACHE_NEGATIVE
> > > to indicate to drop negative dentry in slow path of lookup.
> > >
> > > In overlayfs, negative dentries in upper/lower layers are useless
> > > after construction of overlayfs' own dentry, so in order to
> > > effectively reclaim those dentries, specify LOOKUP_DONTCACHE_NEGATIVE
> > > flag when doing lookup in upper/lower layers.
> >
> > I've looked at this a couple of times now.
> >
> > I'm not at all sure of the wisdom of adding a flag to a VFS function
> > that allows circumventing what a file system chooses to do.
>
> But it is not really a conscious choice is it?
> How exactly does a filesystem express its desire to cache a negative
> dentry? The documentation of lookup() in vfs.rst makes it clear that
> it is not up to the filesystem to make that decision.
> The VFS needs to cache the negative dentry on lookup(), so
> it can turn it positive on create().
> Low level kernel modules that call the VFS lookup() might know
> that caching the negative dentry is counter productive.
>
> >
> > I also do really see the need for it because only hashed negative
> > dentrys will be retained by the VFS so, if you see a hashed negative
> > dentry then you can cause it to be discarded on release of the last
> > reference by dropping it.
> >
> > So what's different here, why is adding an argument to do that drop
> > in the VFS itself needed instead of just doing it in overlayfs?
>
> That was v1 patch. It was dealing with the possible race of
> returned negative dentry becoming positive before dropping it
> in an intrusive manner.
>
> In retrospect, I think this race doesn't matter and there is no
> harm in dropping a positive dentry in a race obviously caused by
> accessing the underlying layer, which as documented results in
> "undefined behavior".
>
> Miklos, am I missing something?

Dropping a positive dentry is harmful in case there's a long term
reference to the dentry (e.g. an open file) since it will look as if
the file was deleted, when in fact it wasn't.

It's possible to unhash a negative dentry in a safe way if we make
sure it cannot become positive.  One way is to grab d_lock and remove
it from the hash table only if count is one.

So yes, we could have a helper to do that instead of the lookup flag.
The disadvantage being that we'd also be dropping negatives that did
not enter the cache because of our lookup.

I don't really care, both are probably good enough for the overlayfs case.

Thanks,
Miklos