[Lustre-discuss] question about dcache revalidate

[Oleg Drokin]

Hello!

On Jan 17, 2012, at 3:26 AM, Lai Siyao wrote:
> Are you referring to ll_lookup_it_finish() that flag negative dentry DCACHE_LUSTRE_INVALID and hash/unhash it immediately if client doesn't have UDATE lock? Looks like such dentry is skipped during link path walk as ll_dcompare checks DCACHE_LUSTRE_INVALID. Or am I looking at wrong place? 
> Normally lustre client doesn't fetch any child lock for lookup(IT_OPEN), but a child dentry will be inserted into hash, however this dentry is marked INVALID, and it will be freed after file->release(), that means, no other processes will use the dentry (in this case other processes will create another dentry for this file and add to hash too). So Oleg means a dentry may be inserted into hash without LOOKUP lock, but this dentry won't be used by others, so it will not cause the race you mentioned.

Actually that was not always the case, the check in d_compare was added a few years later and before then it was perfectly possible
to find invalid dentries and that's why we had this d_revalidate check hitting.

Bye,
    Oleg
--
Oleg Drokin
Senior Software Engineer
Whamcloud, Inc.