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Commit d7852fbd authored by Linus Torvalds's avatar Linus Torvalds
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access: avoid the RCU grace period for the temporary subjective credentials

It turns out that 'access()' (and 'faccessat()') can cause a lot of RCU
work because it installs a temporary credential that gets allocated and
freed for each system call.

The allocation and freeing overhead is mostly benign, but because
credentials can be accessed under the RCU read lock, the freeing
involves a RCU grace period.

Which is not a huge deal normally, but if you have a lot of access()
calls, this causes a fair amount of seconday damage: instead of having a
nice alloc/free patterns that hits in hot per-CPU slab caches, you have
all those delayed free's, and on big machines with hundreds of cores,
the RCU overhead can end up being enormous.

But it turns out that all of this is entirely unnecessary.  Exactly
because access() only installs the credential as the thread-local
subjective credential, the temporary cred pointer doesn't actually need
to be RCU free'd at all.  Once we're done using it, we can just free it
syn...
parent 0ecfebd2
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