The use of ep_call_nested() in ep_eventpoll_poll(), which is the .poll
routine for an epoll fd, is used to prevent excessively deep epoll
nesting, and to prevent circular paths.

However, we are already preventing these conditions during
EPOLL_CTL_ADD.  In terms of too deep epoll chains, we do in fact allow
deep nesting of the epoll fds themselves (deeper than EP_MAX_NESTS),
however we don't allow more than EP_MAX_NESTS when an epoll file
descriptor is actually connected to a wakeup source.  Thus, we do not
require the use of ep_call_nested(), since ep_eventpoll_poll(), which is
called via ep_scan_ready_list() only continues nesting if there are
events available.

Since ep_call_nested() is implemented using a global lock, applications
that make use of nested epoll can see large performance improvements
with this change.

Davidlohr said:

: Improvements are quite obscene actually, such as for the following
: epoll_wait() benchmark with 2 level nesting on a 80 core IvyBridge:
:
: ncpus  vanilla     dirty     delta
: 1      2447092     3028315   +23.75%
: 4      231265      2986954   +1191.57%
: 8      121631      2898796   +2283.27%
: 16     59749       2902056   +4757.07%
: 32     26837	     2326314   +8568.30%
: 64     12926       1341281   +10276.61%
:
: (http://linux-scalability.org/epoll/epoll-test.c)

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1509430214-5599-1-git-send-email-jbaron@akamai.com


Signed-off-by: Jason Baron <jbaron@akamai.com>
Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Salman Qazi <sqazi@google.com>
Cc: Hou Tao <houtao1@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>