Re: [PATCH] fuse: enable caching of symlinks

[Miklos Szeredi]

On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 11:33 PM, Dan Schatzberg <dschatzberg@xxxxxx> wrote:
> On 9/27/18, 9:59 AM, "Miklos Szeredi" <miklos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>  On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 3:52 PM, Dan Schatzberg <dschatzberg@xxxxxx> wrote:
>>> FUSE file reads are cached in the page cache, but symlink reads are
>>> not. This patch enables FUSE READLINK operations to be cached which
>>> can improve performance of some FUSE workloads.
>>>
>>> In particular, I'm working on a FUSE filesystem for access to source
>>> code and discovered that about a 10% improvement to build times is
>>> achieved with this patch (there are a lot of symlinks in the source
>>> tree).
>>>
>>> Please provide feedback, I'm looking to flesh this out more.
>>
>> Need to think about how/when to invalidate the cached symlink
>> contents.  I think treating it like metadata (i.e. look at
>> attr_timeout for validity) would be the simplest.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Miklos
>>
>
> Any further thoughts on this? Just so I can confirm my understanding,
> the attached patch will unconditionally cache READLINK responses
> However, based on the entry timeout provided by the LOOKUP response,
> Userspace can decide to invalidate this by providing a different inode on
> a subsequent LOOKUP (e.g. during fuse_dentry_revalidate())

Indeed.

> Would you like there to be a way to invalidate the cached symlink without
>  changing the inode via LOOKUP?

No, that would make no sense, since symlink contents are not mutable.
This was just a braino on my part.

I still worry about backward compatibility, though.  So we should add
a flag to negotiate symlink caching in with the INIT request.

Thanks,
Miklos