On Mon, Jul 02, 2018 at 02:18:11PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > In the [5/6] changelog it is mentioned that a large number of -ve > dentries can lead to oom-killings. This sounds bad - -ve dentries > should be trivially reclaimable and we shouldn't be oom-killing in such > a situation. > > Dumb question: do we know that negative dentries are actually > worthwhile? Has anyone checked in the past couple of decades? Perhaps > our lookups are so whizzy nowadays that we don't need them?
I can't believe that's true. Have you looked at strace of a typical program startup recently? $ strace -o ls.out ls $ grep -c ENOENT ls.out 10 There's a few duplicates in there (6 accesses to /etc/ld.so.nohwcap), so we definitely want those negative entries.
