linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH] getting misc stats/attributes via xattr API

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Date:   Tue, 10 May 2022 10:07:55 +0200
From:   Miklos Szeredi <miklos@...redi.hu>
To:     Ian Kent <raven@...maw.net>
Cc:     Christian Brauner <brauner@...nel.org>,
        linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>,
        "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>, Karel Zak <kzak@...hat.com>,
        Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        Linux API <linux-api@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-man <linux-man@...r.kernel.org>,
        LSM <linux-security-module@...r.kernel.org>,
        David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        Christian Brauner <christian@...uner.io>,
        Amir Goldstein <amir73il@...il.com>,
        James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...senpartnership.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] getting misc stats/attributes via xattr API

On Tue, 10 May 2022 at 10:06, Miklos Szeredi <miklos@...redi.hu> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 10 May 2022 at 06:27, Ian Kent <raven@...maw.net> wrote:
>
> > > Was there ever a test patch for systemd using fsinfo(2)?  I think
> > > not.
> >
> > Mmm ... I'm hurt you didn't pay any attention to what I did on this
> > during the original fsinfo() discussions.
>
> I can't find anything related to this in my mailbox.  Maybe you
> mentioned it at some point, but I have not been involved with the
> actual systemd changes.  So not meant to belittle your work at all.
>
> > > Until systemd people start to reengineer the mount handing to allow
> > > for retrieving a single mount instead of the complete mount table we
> > > will never know where the performance bottleneck lies.
> >
> > We didn't need the systemd people to do this only review and contribute
> > to the pr for the change and eventually merge it.
> >
> > What I did on this showed that using fsinfo() allone about halved the
> > CPU overhead (from around 4 processes using about 80%) and once the
> > mount notifications was added too it went down to well under 10% per
> > process. The problem here was systemd is quite good at servicing events
> > and reducing event processing overhead meant more events would then be
> > processed. Utilizing the mount notifications queueing was the key to
> > improving this and that was what I was about to work on at the end.
> >
> > But everything stopped before the work was complete.
> >
> > As I said above it's been a long time since I looked at the systemd
> > work and it definitely was a WIP so "what you see is what you get"
> > at https://github.com/raven-au/systemd/commits/. It looks like the
> > place to look to get some idea of what was being done is branch
> > notifications-devel or notifications-rfc-pr. Also note that this
> > uses the libmount fsinfo() infrastrucure that was done by Karal Zak
> > (and a tiny bit by me) at the time.
>
> Looks great as a first step.
>
> What do you mean by "Utilizing the mount notifications queueing"?
>
> Do you mean batching of notifications?   I think that's a very
> important issue: processing each individual notifcation may not make
> sense when there are lots of them.  For example, doing ceate
> mount+remote mount in a loop a million times will result in two

s/remote/remove/

> million notification messages (with high likelyhood of queue
> overflow), but in the end the mount table will end up being the
> same...
>
> Thanks,
> Miklos