The inode LRU mechanism is moot in fuse xlator (ie. there is no
limit for the LRU list), as fuse inodes are referenced from
kernel context, and thus they can only be dropped on request of
the kernel. This might results in a high number of passive
inodes which are useless for the glusterfs client, causing a
significant memory overhead.
This change tries to remedy this by extending the LRU semantics
and allowing to set a finite limit on the fuse inode LRU.
A brief history of problem:
When gluster's inode table was designed, fuse didn't have any
'invalidate' method, which means, userspace application could
never ask kernel to send a 'forget()' fop, instead had to wait
for kernel to send it based on kernel's parameters. Inode table
remembers the number of times kernel has cached the inode based
on the 'nlookup' parameter. And 'nlookup' field is not used by
no other entry points (like server-protocol, gfapi etc).
Hence the inode_table of fuse module always has to have lru-limit
as '0', which means no limit. GlusterFS always had to keep all
inodes in memory as kernel would have had a reference to it.
Again, the reason for this is, kernel's glusterfs inode reference
was pointer of 'inode_t' structure in glusterfs. As it is a
pointer, we could never free it (to prevent segfault, or memory
corruption).
Solution:
In the inode table, handle the prune case of inodes with 'nlookup'
differently, and call a 'invalidator' method, which in this case is
fuse_invalidate(), and it sends the request to kernel for getting
the forget request.
When the kernel sends the forget, it means, it has dropped all
the reference to the inode, and it will send the forget with the
'nlookup' parameter too. We just need to make sure to reduce the
'nlookup' value we have when we get forget. That automatically
cause the relevant prune to happen.
Credits: Csaba Henk, Xavier Hernandez, Raghavendra Gowdappa, Nithya B
fixes: bz#1623107
Change-Id: Ifee0737b23b12b1426c224ec5b8f591f487d83a2
Signed-off-by: Amar Tumballi <amarts@redhat.com>