DragonFly kernel List (threaded) for 2004-04
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upcoming namecache work
I am resuming the namecache work. This is a prereq for several
major DragonFly goals:
userland vfs: The namecache needs to be disentangled from the VFS
code else there would be a billion messages flying
between userland and kernelland.
namespace locking: The intention is for the namecache to be used for
namespace locking operations rather then having to
hold an exclusive lock on the directory vnode.
This will deserialize directory operations such as
rm -rf and allow any precursor I/O for multiple
create, rename, and other directory operations to
proceed in parallel. The actual I/O operation on
the directory will still need an exclusive lock,
but we can potential do further optimizations
vnode locking simplification:
VFS operations (VOP_* calls) have extremely convoluted
vnode locking requirements, primarily due to the fact
that the kernel depends on directory vnode locking
to prevent unexpected namespace changes from taking
place. VOP_RENAME() is especially bad.
But if we do our namespace locking using the
namecache, we can do away with exclusive directory
locks during path lookups.
This also fixes the 'race to root' problem that NFS
has (FreeBSD-5 fixed this by not locking the mount
point directory), but this ALSO fixes filesystem
chokepoints where a vnode lock can race up the
directory chain and cause completely unrelated
processes to stall, which FreeBSD-5 does not fix.
So, some big ticket items here which will be a nice feather in our cap.
-Matt
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