We need to be able to dynamically remove instantiated AGs from memory safely, either for shrinking the filesystem or paging AG state in and out of memory (e.g. supporting millions of AGs). This means we need to be able to safely exclude operations from accessing perags while dynamic removal is in progress. To do this, introduce the concept of active and passive references. Active references are required for high level operations that make use of an AG for a given operation (e.g. allocation) and pin the perag in memory for the duration of the operation that is operating on the perag (e.g. transaction scope). This means we can fail to get an active reference to an AG, hence callers of the new active reference API must be able to handle lookup failure gracefully. Passive references are used in low level code, where we might need to access the perag structure for the purposes of completing high level operations. For example, buffers need to use passive references because: - we need to be able to do metadata IO during operations like grow and shrink transactions where high level active references to the AG have already been blocked - buffers need to pin the perag until they are reclaimed from memory, something that high level code has no direct control over. - unused cached buffers should not prevent a shrink from being started. Hence we have active references that will form exclusion barriers for operations to be performed on an AG, and passive references that will prevent reclaim of the perag until all objects with passive references have been reclaimed themselves. This patch introduce xfs_perag_grab()/xfs_perag_rele() as the API for active AG reference functionality. We also need to convert the for_each_perag*() iterators to use active references, which will start the process of converting high level code over to using active references. Conversion of non-iterator based code to active references will be done in followup patches. Note that the implementation using reference counting is really just a development vehicle for the API to ensure we don't have any leaks in the callers. Once we need to remove perag structures from memory dyanmically, we will need a much more robust per-ag state transition mechanism for preventing new references from being taken while we wait for existing references to drain before removal from memory can occur.... Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Allison Henderson <allison.henderson@oracle.com> Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>