Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 3 Feb 2010 02:52:21 -0800 | From | "Paul E. McKenney" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH][RFC] %pd - for printing dentry name |
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On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 07:09:08AM +0000, Al Viro wrote: > On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 10:53:41PM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > > > Here is an approximation that might inspire someone to come up with a > > real solution. > > > > One approach would be to store the name length with the name, so that > > struct qstr loses the "len" field, and so that its "name" field points > > to a struct that has a "len" field followed by an array of const > > unsigned char. That way, the name and length are closely associated. > > When you pick up a struct qstr's "name" pointer, you are guaranteed to > > get a length that matches the name. > > > > Unfortunately: > > > > o In theory, this leaves the length of the dentry unchanged, but > > alignment is a problem on 64-bit systems. Also, the long names > > gain an extra four bytes. > > That one is not a big deal.
K.
> > o If you get a pointer to the d_iname small-name field, rename > > might still change the name out from under you. This could in > > theory be fixed by refusing to re-use the d_iname field until > > an RCU grace period had elapsed (using an external structure > > instead). In practice, not sure if this is really a reasonable > > approach. > > That, OTOH, is - most of dentries use inline name and external one is > really a rarely used fallback. Making it a common case isn't nice.
It is possible to move it back inline after a grace period, so that the external name would be in use for only a few milliseconds after the rename, but that of course adds more complexity.
> There's another practical problem - a lot of code uses qstr fields and > patch will be painful; I couldn't care less about the out-of-tree code, > but it's a flagday change and in-tree patch size is not something to > sneeze at - I've been crawling through all that code for the last couple > of days and there's a lot of it.
Indeed!!!
> Trying to play with seqlock-based solutions sounds more promising; I've > missed it completely and I'm half-asleep right now, so I'll try to take > a look at that after I get some sleep.
Certainly sounds worth a try.
Thanx, Paul
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