原文来自:http://lwn.net/Articles/336224/

选择感兴趣内容简单翻译了下: 

在内核社区一直以来的兴趣是保证质量.我们需要保证和改善质量是显而易见的.但是如何做到却不是那么简单.一个广泛的办法是找到一些成功之处来增加内核在多方面的透明性.这将使得这些方面的质量变得更加明朗,因此将改变内核质量.

采用多种形式增加透明性:

• checkpatch.pl脚本突出显示了从已接受代码书写风格上的背离.这将鼓励使用此脚本的人去改正格式问题.因此,通过增加风格引导的透明性,我们增加了代码表现上的一致性,而且在一定程度上改善了质量.
• 内嵌的"lockdep"系统动态估量锁之间的依赖和相关状态(比如当可打断时).它将在锁异常时报告所用发生的事情.异常不只是死锁或者类似问题,而是许多事情,并且死锁可能被移除.因此通过增加锁依赖图的透明性,可以提高质量.
• 内核包含多种其他的透明性改善,比如定位未使用内存的位置来提高有效访问的透明性,或者在堆栈跟踪时用象征性名字而不是16进制地址使得bug报告更加有用.
• 在更高层面,用git版本来追踪软件改变,看到每个人何时做了什么.事实是它鼓励在patch上加注释来回答这段代码为什么这样写.这种透明性可以增进对代码的理解,而且随着其他开发者更好被通知而改善质量.

内核里还要很多其他地方以提高透明性的做法或者可以改善质量.我们将挖掘改善质量的透明性的地方.并称之为内核相关的设计模式.

设计模式

设计模式首先在架构领域被提出,并带入计算机工程,特别是在OO编程领域.通过1994年出版的<设计模式:重用面向对象软件的元素.

简单来说,一种设计模式描述了设计问题的一种特定类型和解决此类问题已经证明有效解决办法的细节.设计模式的益处是它把问题描述和解决办法描述组合在一起并给他们一个命名.给一种模式一个简单和可记忆的名字是十分有价值的.如果开发者和复审代码者都知道同一个模式的相同命名,那么一个明确的设计决策可以用一两个单词来交流,因此把这种决定更透明.

In the Linux kernel code base there are many design patterns that have been found to be effective. However most of them have never been documented so they are not easily available to other developers. It is my hope that by explicitly documenting these patterns, I can help them to be more widely used and, thus, developers will be able to achieve effective solutions to common problems more quickly.

In the remainder of this series we will be looking at three problem domains and finding a variety of design patterns of greatly varying scope and significance. Our goal in doing so is to not only to enunciate these patterns, but also to show the range and value of such patterns so that others might make the effort to enunciate patterns that they have seen.

A number of examples from the Linux kernel will be presented throughout this series as examples are an important part of illuminating any pattern. Unless otherwise stated they are all from 2.6.30-rc4.

Reference Counts

The idea of using a reference counter to manage the lifetime of an object is fairly common. The core idea is to have a counter which is incremented whenever a new reference is taken and decremented when a reference is released. When this counter reaches zero any resources used by the object (such as the memory used to store it) can be freed.

The mechanisms for managing reference counts seem quite straightforward. However there are some subtleties that make it quite easy to get the mechanisms wrong. Partly for this reason, the Linux kernel has (since 2004) a data type known as "kref" with associated support routines (seeDocumentation/kref.txt, <linux/kref.h>, and lib/kref.c). These encapsulate some of those subtleties and, in particular, make it clear that a given counter is being used as a reference counter in a particular way. As noted above, names for design patterns are very valuable and just providing that name for kernel developers to use is a significant benefit for reviewers.

In the words of Andrew Morton:

This inclusion of kref in the Linux kernel gives both a tick and a cross to the kernel in terms of explicit support for design patterns. A tick is deserved as the kref clearly embodies an important design pattern, is well documented, and is clearly visible in the code when used. It deserves a cross however because the kref only encapsulates part of the story about reference counting. There are some usages of reference counting that do not fit well into the kref model as we will see shortly. Having a "blessed" mechanism for reference counting that does not provide the required functionality can actually encourage mistakes as people might use a kref where it doesn‘t belong and so think it should just work where in fact it doesn‘t.

A useful step to understanding the complexities of reference counting is to understand that there are often two distinctly different sorts of references to an object. In truth there can be three or even more, but that is very uncommon and can usually be understood by generalizing the case of two. We will call the two types of references "external" and "internal", though in some cases "strong" and "weak" might be more appropriate.

An "external" reference is the sort of reference we are probably most accustomed to think about. They are counted with "get" and "put" and can be held by subsystems quite distant from the subsystem that manages the object. The existence of a counted external reference has a strong and simple meaning: This object is in use.

By contrast, an "internal" reference is often not counted, and is only held internally to the system that manages the object (or some close relative). Different internal references can have very different meanings and hence very different implications for implementation.

Possibly the most common example of an internal reference is a cache which provides a "lookup by name" service. If you know the name of an object, you can apply to the cache to get an external reference, providing the object actually exists in the cache. Such a cache would hold each object on a list, or on one of a number of lists under e.g. a hash table. The presence of the object on such a list is a reference to the object. However it is likely not a counted reference. It does not mean "this object is in use" but only "this object is hanging around in case someone wants it". Objects are not removed from the list until all external references have been dropped, and possibly they won‘t be removed immediately even then. Clearly the existence and nature of internal references can have significant implications on how reference counting is implemented.

One useful way to classify different reference counting styles is by the required implementation of the "put" operation. The "get" operation is always the same. It takes an external reference and produces another external reference. It is implemented by something like:

    assert(obj->refcount > 0) ; increment(obj->refcount);

or, in Linux-kernel C:

    BUG_ON(atomic_read(&obj->refcnt)) ; atomic_inc(&obj->refcnt);

Note that "get" cannot be used on an unreferenced object. Something else is needed there.

The "put" operation comes in three variations. While there can be some overlap in use cases, it is good to keep them separate to help with clarity of the code. The three options, in Linux-C, are:

   1      atomic_dec(&obj->refcnt);   2      if (atomic_dec_and_test(&obj->refcnt)) { ... do stuff ... }   3      if (atomic_dec_and_lock(&obj->refcnt, &subsystem_lock)) {                 ..... do stuff ....		 spin_unlock(&subsystem_lock);	  }

The "kref" style

Starting in the middle, option "2" is the style used for a kref. This style is appropriate when the object does not outlive its last external reference. When that reference count becomes zero, the object needs to be freed or otherwise dealt with, hence the need to test for the zero condition withatomic_dec_and_test().

Objects that fit this style often do not have any internal references to worry about, as is the case with most objects in sysfs, which is a heavy user of kref. If, instead, an object using the kref style does have internal references, it cannot be allowed to create an external reference from an internal reference unless there are known to be other external references. If this is necessary, a primitive is available:

     atomic_inc_not_zero(&obj->refcnt);

which increments a value providing it isn‘t zero, and returns a result indicating success or otherwise. atomic_inc_not_zero() is a relatively recent invention in the linux kernel, appearing in late 2005 as part of the lockless page cache work. For this reason it isn‘t widely used and some code that could benefit from it uses spinlocks instead. Sadly, the kref package does not make use of this primitive either.

An interesting example of this style of reference that does not use kref, and does not even useatomic_dec_and_test() (though it could and arguably should) are the two ref counts in struct super:s_count and s_active.

s_active fits the kref style of reference counts exactly. A superblock starts life with s_active being 1 (set in alloc_super()), and, when s_active becomes zero, further external references cannot be taken. This rule is encoded in grab_super(), though this is not immediately clear. The current code (for historical reasons) adds a very large value (S_BIAS) to s_count whenever s_active is non-zero, andgrab_super() tests for s_count exceeding S_BIAS rather than for s_active being zero. It could just as easily do the latter test using atomic_inc_not_zero(), and avoid the use of spinlocks.

s_count provides for a different sort of reference which has both "internal" and "external" aspects. It is internal in that its semantic is much weaker than that of s_active-counted references. References counted by s_count just mean "this superblock cannot be freed just now" without asserting that it is actually active. It is external in that it is much like a kref starting life at 1 (well, 1*S_BIAS actually), and when it becomes zero (in __put_super()) the superblock is destroyed.

So these two reference counts could be replaced by two krefs, providing:

• S_BIAS was set to 1

   

• grab_super() used atomic_inc_not_zero() rather than testing against S_BIAS

and a number of spinlock calls could go away. The details are left as an exercise for the reader.

The "kcref" style

The Linux kernel doesn‘t have a "kcref" object, but that is a name that seems suitable to propose for the next style of reference count. The "c" stands for "cached" as this style is very often used in caches. So it is a Kernel Cached REFerence.

A kcref uses atomic_dec_and_lock() as given in option 3 above. It does this because, on the last put, it needs to be freed or checked to see if any other special handling is needed. This needs to be done under a lock to ensure no new reference is taken while the current state is being evaluated.

A simple example here is the i_count reference counter in struct inode. The important part of iput()reads:

    if (atomic_dec_and_lock(&inode->i_count, &inode_lock))	iput_final(inode);

where iput_final() examines the state of the inode and decides if it can be destroyed, or left in the cache in case it could get reused soon.

Among other things, the inode_lock prevents new external references being created from the internal references of the inode hash table. For this reason converting internal references to external references is only permitted while the inode_lock is held. It is no accident that the function supporting this is called iget_locked() (or iget5_locked()).

A slightly more complex example is in struct dentry, where d_count is managed like a kcref. It is more complex because two locks need to be taken before we can be sure no new reference can be taken - both dcache_lock and de->d_lock. This requires that either we hold one lock, thenatomic_dec_and_lock() the other (as in prune_one_dentry()), or that we atomic_dec_and_lock() the first, then claim the second and retest the refcount - as in dput(). This is good example of the fact that you can never assume you have encapsulated all possible reference counting styles. Needing two locks could hardly be foreseen.

An even more complex kcref-style refcount is mnt_count in struct vfsmount. The complexity here is the interplay of the two refcounts that this structure has: mnt_count, which is a fairly straightforward count of external references, and mnt_pinned, which counts internal references from the process accounting module. In particular it counts the number of accounting files that are open on the filesystem (and as such could use a more meaningful name). The complexity comes from the fact that when there are only internal references remaining, they are all converted to external references. Exploring the details of this is again left as an exercise for the interested reader.

The "plain" style

The final style for refcounting involves just decrementing the reference count (atomic_dec()) and not doing anything else. This style is relatively uncommon in the kernel, and for good reason. Leaving unreferenced objects just lying around isn‘t a good idea.

One use of this style is in struct buffer_head, managed by fs/buffer.c and <linux/buffer_head.h>. Theput_bh() function is simply:

    static inline void put_bh(struct buffer_head *bh)    {        smp_mb__before_atomic_dec();        atomic_dec(&bh->b_count);    }

This is OK because buffer_heads have lifetime rules that are closely tied to a page. One or more buffer_heads get allocated to a page to chop it up into smaller pieces (buffers). They tend to remain there until the page is freed at which point all the buffer_heads will be purged (bydrop_buffers() called from try_to_free_buffers()).

In general, the "plain" style is suitable if it is known that there will always be an internal reference so that the object doesn‘t get lost, and if there is some process whereby this internal reference will eventually get used to find and free the object.

Anti-patterns

To wrap up this little review of reference counting as an introduction to design patterns, we will discuss the related concept of an anti-pattern. While design patterns are approaches that have been shown to work and should be encouraged, anti-patterns are approaches that history shows us do not work well and should be discouraged.

Your author would like to suggest that the use of a "bias" in a refcount is an example of an anti-pattern. A bias in this context is a large value that is added to, or subtracted from, the reference count and is used to effectively store one bit of information. We have already glimpsed the idea of a bias in the management of s_count for superblocks. In this case the presence of the bias indicates that the value of s_active is non-zero, which is easy enough to test directly. So the bias adds no value here and only obscures the true purpose of the code.

Another example of a bias is in the management of struct sysfs_dirent, in fs/sysfs/sysfs.h andfs/sysfs/dir.c. Interestingly, sysfs_dirent has two refcounts just like superblocks, also called s_countand s_active. In this case s_active has a large negative bias when the entry is being deactivated. The same bit of information could be stored just as effectively and much more clearly in the flag words_flags. Storing single bits of information in flags is much easier to understand that storing them as a bias in a counter, and should be preferred.

In general, using a bias does not add any clarity as it is not a common pattern. It cannot add more functionality than a single flag bit can provide, and it would be extremely rare that memory is so tight that one bit cannot be found to record whatever would otherwise be denoted by the presence of the bias. For these reasons, biases in refcounts should be considered anti-patterns and avoided if at all possible.

Conclusion

This brings to a close our exploration of the various design patterns surrounding reference counts. Simply having terminology such a "kref" versus "kcref" and "external" versus "internal" references can be very helpful in increasing the visibility of the behaviour of different references and counts. Having code to embody this as we do with kref and could with kcref, and using this code at every opportunity, would be a great help both to developers who might find it easy to choose the right model first time, and to reviewers who can see more clearly what is intended.

The design patterns we have covered in this article are:

• kref: When the lifetime of an object extends only to the moment that the last external reference is dropped, a kref is appropriate. If there are any internal reference to the object, they can only be promoted to external references with atomic_inc_not_zero(). Examples:s_active and s_count in struct super_block.

   

• kcref: With this the lifetime of an object can extend beyond the dropping of the last external reference, the kcref with its atomic_dec_and_lock() is appropriate. An internal reference can only be converted to an external reference will the subsystem lock is held. Examples: i_countin struct inode.

   

• plain: When the lifetime of an object is subordinate to some other object, the plain reference pattern is appropriate. Non-zero reference counts on the object must be treated as internal reference to the parent object, and converting internal references to external references must follow the same rules as for the parent object. Examples: b_count in struct buffer_head.

   

• biased-reference: When you feel the need to use add a large bias to the value in a reference count to indicate some particular state, don‘t. Use a flag bit elsewhere. This is an anti-pattern.

Next week we will move on to another area where the Linux kernel has proved some successful design patterns and explore the slightly richer area of complex data structures. (Part 2 and part 3of this series are now available).

Exercises

As your author has been reminded while preparing this series, there is nothing like a directed study of code to clarify understanding of these sorts of issues. With that in mind, here are some exercises for the interested reader.

1. Replace s_active and s_count in struct super with krefs, discarding S_BIAS in the process. Compare the result with the original using the trifecta of Correctness, Maintainability, and Performance.

    

2. Choose a more meaningful name for mnt_pinned and related functions that manipulate it.

    

3. Add a function to the kref library that makes use of atomic_inc_not_zero(), and using it (or otherwise) remove the use of atomic_dec_and_lock() on a kref in net/sunrpc/svcauth.c - a usage which violates the kref abstraction.

    

4. Examine the _count reference count in struct page (see mm_types.h for example) and determine whether it behaves most like a kref or a kcref (hint: it is not "plain"). This should involve identifying any and all internal references and related locking rules. Identify why the page cache (struct address_space.page_tree) owns a counted reference or explain why it should not. This will involve understanding page_freeze_refs() and its usage in__remove_mapping(), as well as page_cache_{get,add}_speculative().

Bonus credit: provide a series of minimal self-contained patches to implement any changes that the above investigations proved useful.