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[Jonathan Davies <jonathan.davies@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Precise 3.2.0-52-virtual large VM:

#ns       ms
1      103
1001      138
2001      219
3001      374
4001      606
5001      847
6001      921
7001      1438
8001      1734
9001      2099
10001      2441

Precise 3.5.0-43-generic lts-quantal large VM:

#ns       ms
1      23
1001      45
2001      86
3001      93
4001      171
5001      147
6001      258
7001      403
8001      359
9001      538
10001      386

** Tags removed: verification-needed-quantal
** Tags added: verification-done-quantal

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You received this bug notification because you are a member of Kernel
Packages, which is subscribed to linux in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1226726

Title:
  dentry_reset_mounted walks entire mount list holding vfsmount write
  lock

Status in “linux” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “linux” source package in Precise:
  Won't Fix
Status in “linux” source package in Quantal:
  Fix Committed
Status in “linux” source package in Raring:
  Fix Committed
Status in “linux” source package in Saucy:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  SRU Justification:

  Impact: When creating thousands of network namespaces the delay in
  executing commands increases exponentially in kernels before 84d17192.

  Fix: In 84d17192 in the upstream kernel, locking code in
  fs/namespace.c is greatly improved resulting in much better
  performance when the number namespaces increase.

  Testcase: Below, test_ns.sh can be run and a graph can be compared
  between the existing version and the patched version.

  Additional Information: Because this is a change in the vfs layer, I
  ran the xfstests and compared before and after results of this patch.
  The patch did not create any additional failures in the generic
  xfstests.

  The quantal and raring solutions differ but are both based on the 84d17192
  patch. The quantal solution does a backport of this patch instead of clean
  cherry-picks because of the amount of deps required to just use cherry-picks.
  The raring solution was able to be done with two clean cherry-picks and that's
  why that solution was chosen.

  --

  Whenever one enters a network namespace via "ip netns exec foobar
  somecommand" there is a mount done of the appropriate device on /sys
  since "somecommand" needs to see namespace specific versions of /sys
  directories. When the ip process exits these mounts need to be torn
  down, and that requires a global write lock for vfsmount_lock (this is
  a single writer multiple reader lock). This has serious performance
  implications when the number of name spaces increase.

  The commit 84d17192 addresses this issue, and it is clear by running
  the attached testcase that it fixes performance issues when dealing
  with large numbers of namespaces. I've included a graph with the
  differences in performance between this fix and its parent commit to
  show the the improve in performance. The x-axis represents the number
  of namespaces and the y-axis is execution time in ms. After applying
  the patch the performance delays are not exponentially increasing.

  This affects 3.2/3.5/3.8 series kernels, as it was fixed in 3.10.

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