[PATCH] VFS: Destroy the dentries contributed by a superblock on unmounting

The attached patch destroys all the dentries attached to a superblock in one go
by:

 (1) Destroying the tree rooted at s_root.

 (2) Destroying every entry in the anon list, one at a time.

 (3) Each entry in the anon list has its subtree consumed from the leaves
     inwards.

This reduces the amount of work generic_shutdown_super() does, and avoids
iterating through the dentry_unused list.

Note that locking is almost entirely absent in the shrink_dcache_for_umount*()
functions added by this patch.  This is because:

 (1) at the point the filesystem calls generic_shutdown_super(), it is not
     permitted to further touch the superblock's set of dentries, and nor may
     it remove aliases from inodes;

 (2) the dcache memory shrinker now skips dentries that are being unmounted;
     and

 (3) the superblock no longer has any external references through which the VFS
     can reach it.

Given these points, the only locking we need to do is when we remove dentries
from the unused list and the name hashes, which we do a directory's worth at a
time.

We also don't need to guard against reference counts going to zero unexpectedly
and removing bits of the tree we're working on as nothing else can call dput().

A cut down version of dentry_iput() has been folded into
shrink_dcache_for_umount_subtree() function.  Apart from not needing to unlock
things, it also doesn't need to check for inotify watches.

In this version of the patch, the complaint about a dentry still being in use
has been expanded from a single BUG_ON() and now gives much more information.

Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Acked-by: Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 6 deletions

diff --git a/fs/super.c b/fs/super.c
index aec99ddbe53..47e554c12e7 100644
--- a/fs/super.c
+++ b/fs/super.c
@@ -260,17 +260,17 @@ int fsync_super(struct super_block *sb)
  *	that need destruction out of superblock, call generic_shutdown_super()
  *	and release aforementioned objects.  Note: dentries and inodes _are_
  *	taken care of and do not need specific handling.
+ *
+ *	Upon calling this function, the filesystem may no longer alter or
+ *	rearrange the set of dentries belonging to this super_block, nor may it
+ *	change the attachments of dentries to inodes.
  */
 void generic_shutdown_super(struct super_block *sb)
 {
-	struct dentry *root = sb->s_root;
 	struct super_operations *sop = sb->s_op;
 
-	if (root) {
-		sb->s_root = NULL;
-		shrink_dcache_parent(root);
-		shrink_dcache_sb(sb);
-		dput(root);
+	if (sb->s_root) {
+		shrink_dcache_for_umount(sb);
 		fsync_super(sb);
 		lock_super(sb);
 		sb->s_flags &= ~MS_ACTIVE;