af0c9af1b3
The current dentry number tracking code doesn't distinguish between positive & negative dentries. It just reports the total number of dentries in the LRU lists. As excessive number of negative dentries can have an impact on system performance, it will be wise to track the number of positive and negative dentries separately. This patch adds tracking for the total number of negative dentries in the system LRU lists and reports it in the 5th field in the /proc/sys/fs/dentry-state file. The number, however, does not include negative dentries that are in flight but not in the LRU yet as well as those in the shrinker lists which are on the way out anyway. The number of positive dentries in the LRU lists can be roughly found by subtracting the number of negative dentries from the unused count. Matthew Wilcox had confirmed that since the introduction of the dentry_stat structure in 2.1.60, the dummy array was there, probably for future extension. They were not replacements of pre-existing fields. So no sane applications that read the value of /proc/sys/fs/dentry-state will do dummy thing if the last 2 fields of the sysctl parameter are not zero. IOW, it will be safe to use one of the dummy array entry for negative dentry count. Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.