Re: [PATCH] xfs: use percpu_counter_compare instead of naive comparing

[çæ <xuw2015@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 10:22:24AM +0800, xuw2015@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> From: George Wang <xuw2015@xxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> Function percpu_counter_read just return the current counter, regardless of
>> every cpu's count. This counter can be negative value, which will cause the
>> checking of "allocated inode counts <= m_maxicount" false positive.
>
> Have you actually seen this, or is it just theoretical?

I produced it by running unionmount-testsuites for overlay, based xfs as upper
and lowerdir. I think I can extract the procedure to reproduce it.

>> Commit 501ab3238753 "xfs: use generic percpu counters for inode counter
<snip>
> The correct fix is to use percpu_counter_read_positive(), because in
> the majority of cases args.mp->m_maxicount is orders of magnitude
> larger (20 million inodes per 100GB of fs space for small filesystems)
> than the unaggregated per-cpu counts can cause the sum to go
> negative. Hence if it is negative, it may as well be zero because it
> makes no difference to the default threshold configurations.

Thanks for the explanation, and I agree that totally.
Besides, shall we use the exact count in xfs_fs_counts? Because it's a ioctl
function, not so much sensitive performance.