Re: [PATCH 3/3] tools/lib/fs: Cache cgroupfs mount point

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo]

Em Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 02:51:44PM +0900, Namhyung Kim escreveu:
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2021 at 10:33 AM Namhyung Kim <namhyung@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Arnaldo,
> >
> > On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 8:51 PM Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo
> > <acme@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > Em Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 06:05:56PM +0900, Namhyung Kim escreveu:
> > > > Currently it parses the /proc file everytime it opens a file in the
> > > > cgroupfs.  Save the last result to avoid it (assuming it won't be
> > > > changed between the accesses).
> > >
> > > Which is the most likely case, but can't we use something like inotify
> > > to detect that and bail out or warn the user?
> >
> > Hmm.. looks doable.  Will check.
> 
> So I've played with inotify a little bit, and it seems it needs to monitor
> changes on the file or the directory.  I didn't get any notification from
> the /proc/mounts file even if I did some mount/umount.
> 
> Instead, I could get IN_UNMOUNT when the cgroup filesystem was
> unmounted.  But for the monitoring, we need to do one of a) select-like
> syscall to wait for the events, b) signal-driven IO notification or c) read
> the inotify file with non-block mode everytime.
> 
> In a library code, I don't think we can do a) or b) since it can affect
> user program behaviors.  Then we should go with c) but I think
> it's opposite to the purpose of this patch. :)
> 
> As you said, I think mostly we don't care as the accesses will happen
> in a short period of time.  But if you really care, maybe for the upcoming
> perf daemon changes, I think we can add an API to invalidate the cache
> or internal time-based invalidation logic (like remove it after 10 sec.).

Ok, we can have something in 'perf daemon' to periodically invalidate
this, maybe do a poor man inotify and when asking for the cgroup
mountpoint, check some characteristic of that file that changes when it
is modified, or plain use a timestamp and have some threshold.

- Arnaldo
 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Thanks,
> Namhyung

-- 

- Arnaldo