Re: [PATCH] dcache: add fs.dentry-limit sysctl with negative-first reaper

[Ian Kent]

On 18/5/26 16:19, Jan Kara wrote:
> Hi Ian,
>
> On Mon 18-05-26 10:55:43, Ian Kent wrote:
> > On 18/5/26 07:55, NeilBrown wrote:
> > > On Fri, 15 May 2026, Horst Birthelmer wrote:
> > > According to the email you linked, a problem arises when a directory has
> > > a great many negative children.  Code which walks the list of children
> > > (such as fsnotify) while holding a lock can suffer unpredictable delays
> > > and result in long lock-hold times.  So maybe a limit on negative
> > > dentries for any parent is what we really want.  That would be clumsy to
> > > implement I imagine.
> > But the notion of dropping the dentry in ->d_delete() on last dput() is
> > simple enough but did see regressions (the only other place in the VFS
> > besides dentry_kill() that the inode is unlinked from the dentry on
> > dput()). I wonder if the regression was related to the test itself
> > deliberately recreating deleted files and if that really is normal
> > behaviour. By itself that should prevent almost all negative dentries
> > being retained. Although file systems could do this as well (think XFS
> > inode recycling) it should be reasonable to require it be left to the
> > VFS.
> >
> > But even that's not enough given that, in my case, there would still be
> > around 4 million dentries in the LRU cache and in fsnotify there are
> > directory child traversals holding the parent i_lock "spinlock" that are
> > going to cause problems.
> Do you mean there are very many positive children of a directory?

Didn't quantify that.


The symptom is the "Spinlock held for more than ... seconds" occurring

in the log. So there are certainly a lot of children in the list, but

it's an assumption the ratio of positive to negative entries is roughly

the same as the overall ratio in the dcache.


> > That's all that much more puzzling when I see things like commit
> > 172e422ffea2 ("fsnotify: clear PARENT_WATCHED flags lazily") which looks
> > like it implies the child flag depends entirely on the parent state (what
> > am I missing Amir?)
> PARENT_WATCHED dentry flags (as the name suggests) are only caching the
> information whether the parent has notification marks receiving events from
> the child. So yes, the flag fully depends on the parent state.

Ok, this is something I was after, I will keep looking at the fsnotify

code since there is something to find, thanks for that.


> > so why is this traversal even retained in fsnotify?
> Not sure which traversal you mean but if you set watch on a parent, you
> have to walk all children to set PARENT_WATCHED flag so that you don't miss
> events on children...

Yes, that traversal is what I'm questioning ... again thanks.


I think the function name is still fsnotify_set_children_dentry_flags() in

recent kernels, the subject of commit 172e422ffea2 I mentioned above.


When you say miss events are you saying that accessing the parent dentry to

work out if the child needs to respond to an event is quite expensive in the

overall event processing context, that might make more sense to me ... or do

I completely not yet understand the reasoning behind the need for the flag?


> > > But what if we move dentries to the end of the list when they become
> > > negative, and to the start of the list when they become positive?  Then
> > > code which walks the child list could simply abort on the first
> > > negative.
> > >
> > > I doubt that would be quite as easy as it sounds, but it would at least
> > > be more focused on the observed symptom rather than some whole-system
> > > number which only vaguely correlates with the observed symptom.
> > >
> > > Maybe a completely different approach: change children-walking code to
> > > drop and retake the lock (with appropriate validation) periodically.
> > > What too would address the specific symptom.
> > Another good question.
> >
> > I have assumed that dropping and re-taking the lock cannot be done but
> > this is a question I would like answered as well. Dropping and re-taking
> > lock would require, as Miklos pointed out to me off-list, recording the
> > list position with say a cursor, introducing unwanted complexity when it
> > would be better to accept the cost of a single extra access to the parent
> > flags (which I assume is one reason to set the flag in the child).
> The parent access is actually more expensive than you might think. Based on
> experience with past fsnotify related performance regression I expect some
> 20% performance hit for small tmpfs writes if you add unconditional parent
> access to the write path.

That sounds like a lot for what should be a memory access of an already in

memory structure since the parent must be accessed to traverse the list of

child entries. I clearly don't fully understand the implications of what

I'm saying but there has been mention of another context ...


Nevertheless more useful information, ;)


Thanks again,

Ian