Re: bl_list and lockdep

[Thomas Gleixner]

Dave,

On Tue, Apr 13 2021 at 19:58, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 01:18:35AM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> So for solving the inode cache scalability issue with RT in mind,
> we're left with these choices:
>
> a) increase memory consumption and cacheline misses for everyone by
>    adding a spinlock per hash chain so that RT kernels can do their
>    substitution magic and make the memory footprint and scalability
>    for RT kernels worse
>
> b) convert the inode hash table to something different (rhashtable,
>    radix tree, Xarray, etc) that is more scalable and more "RT
>    friendly".
>
> c) have RT kernel substitute hlist-bl with hlist_head and a spinlock
>    so that it all works correctly on RT kernels and only RT kernels
>    take the memory footprint and cacheline miss penalties...
>
> We rejected a) for the dentry hash table, so it is not an appropriate
> soltion for the inode hash table for the same reasons.
>
> There is a lot of downside to b). Firstly there's the time and
> resources needed for experimentation to find an appropriate
> algorithm for both scalability and RT. Then all the insert, removal
> and search facilities will have to be rewritten, along with all the
> subtlies like "fake hashing" to allow fielsysetms to provide their
> own inode caches.  The changes in behaviour and, potentially, API
> semantics will greatly increase the risk of regressions and adverse
> behaviour on both vanilla and RT kernels compared to option a) or
> c).
>
> It is clear that option c) is of minimal risk to vanilla kernels,
> and low risk to RT kernels. It's pretty straight forward to do for
> both configs, and only the RT kernels take the memory footprint
> penalty.
>
> So a technical analysis points to c) being the most reasonable
> resolution of the problem.

I agree with that analysis for technical reasons and I'm not entirely
unfamiliar how to solve hlist_bl conversions on RT either as you might
have guessed.

Having a technical argument to discuss and agree on is far simpler
than going along with "I don't care".

Thanks for taking the time to put a technical rationale on this!

       tglx