Skip to content
  • Al Viro's avatar
    smarter propagate_mnt() · f2ebb3a9
    Al Viro authored
    
    
    The current mainline has copies propagated to *all* nodes, then
    tears down the copies we made for nodes that do not contain
    counterparts of the desired mountpoint.  That sets the right
    propagation graph for the copies (at teardown time we move
    the slaves of removed node to a surviving peer or directly
    to master), but we end up paying a fairly steep price in
    useless allocations.  It's fairly easy to create a situation
    where N calls of mount(2) create exactly N bindings, with
    O(N^2) vfsmounts allocated and freed in process.
    
    Fortunately, it is possible to avoid those allocations/freeings.
    The trick is to create copies in the right order and find which
    one would've eventually become a master with the current algorithm.
    It turns out to be possible in O(nodes getting propagation) time
    and with no extra allocations at all.
    
    One part is that we need to make sure that eventual master will be
    created before its slaves, so we need to walk the propagation
    tree in a different order - by peer groups.  And iterate through
    the peers before dealing with the next group.
    
    Another thing is finding the (earlier) copy that will be a master
    of one we are about to create; to do that we are (temporary) marking
    the masters of mountpoints we are attaching the copies to.
    
    Either we are in a peer of the last mountpoint we'd dealt with,
    or we have the following situation: we are attaching to mountpoint M,
    the last copy S_0 had been attached to M_0 and there are sequences
    S_0...S_n, M_0...M_n such that S_{i+1} is a master of S_{i},
    S_{i} mounted on M{i} and we need to create a slave of the first S_{k}
    such that M is getting propagation from M_{k}.  It means that the master
    of M_{k} will be among the sequence of masters of M.  On the
    other hand, the nearest marked node in that sequence will either
    be the master of M_{k} or the master of M_{k-1} (the latter -
    in the case if M_{k-1} is a slave of something M gets propagation
    from, but in a wrong peer group).
    
    So we go through the sequence of masters of M until we find
    a marked one (P).  Let N be the one before it.  Then we go through
    the sequence of masters of S_0 until we find one (say, S) mounted
    on a node D that has P as master and check if D is a peer of N.
    If it is, S will be the master of new copy, if not - the master of S
    will be.
    
    That's it for the hard part; the rest is fairly simple.  Iterator
    is in next_group(), handling of one prospective mountpoint is
    propagate_one().
    
    It seems to survive all tests and gives a noticably better performance
    than the current mainline for setups that are seriously using shared
    subtrees.
    
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAl Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
    f2ebb3a9