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 synchronously and avoid all the RCU overhead. So add a 'non_rcu' flag to 'struct cred', which can be set by users that know they only use it in non-RCU context (there are other potential users for this). We can make it a union with the rcu freeing list head that we need for the RCU case, so this doesn't need any extra storage. Note that this also makes 'get_current_cred()' clear the new non_rcu flag, in case we have filesystems that take a long-term reference to the cred and then expect the RCU delayed freeing afterwards. It's not entirely clear that this is required, but it makes for clear semantics: the subjective cred remains non-RCU as long as you only access it synchronously using the thread-local accessors, but you _can_ use it as a generic cred if you want to. It is possible that we should just remove the whole RCU markings for ->cred entirely. Only ->real_cred is really supposed to be accessed through RCU, and the long-term cred copies that nfs uses might want to explicitly re-enable RCU freeing if required, rather than have get_current_cred() do it implicitly. But this is a "minimal semantic changes" change for the immediate problem.

LTLinus Torvalds committed 7 years ago