Re: [Cluster-devel] [PATCH v2 0/2] gfs2: Stop using rhashtable_walk_peek

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On 29 March 2018 at 14:24, Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Can we solve the problem another way, by not taking refs on the glocks when
> we are iterating over them for the debugfs files? I assume that is the main
> issue here.
>
> We didn't used to take refs since the rcu locking was enough during the walk
> itself. We used to only keep track of the hash bucket and offset within the
> bucket when we dropped the rcu lock between calls to the iterator. I may
> have lost track of why that approach did not work?

That doesn't work because when a glock doesn't fit into one read, we
need to make sure that the next read will continue with the same glock
or else we'll end up with a corrupted dump. And rhashtable_walk_peek
cannot guarantee that.

I've done some minimal performance testing and the additional ref
taking only impacted the performance in the 10% range or less, so it
doesn't really matter.

Andreas