• Hugh Dickins's avatar
    [PATCH] simple fs stop -ve dentries · 8a34e562
    Hugh Dickins authored
    A tmpfs user reported increasingly slow directory reads when repeatedly
    creating and unlinking in a mkstemp-like way.  The negative dentries
    accumulate alarmingly (until memory pressure finally frees them), and are
    just a hindrance to any in-memory filesystem.  simple_lookup set d_op to
    arrange for negative dentries to be deleted immediately.
    
    (But I failed to discover how it is that on-disk filesystems seem to keep
    their negative dentries within manageable bounds: this effect was gross
    with tmpfs or ramfs, but no problem at all with extN or reiser.)
    Signed-off-by: default avatarHugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    8a34e562
libfs.c 11.5 KB