Currently unregistering sysctl table does not prune its dentries.
Stale dentries could slowdown sysctl operations significantly.

For example, command:

 # for i in {1..100000} ; do unshare -n -- sysctl -a &> /dev/null ; done
 creates a millions of stale denties around sysctls of loopback interface:

 # sysctl fs.dentry-state
 fs.dentry-state = 25812579  24724135        45      0       0       0

 All of them have matching names thus lookup have to scan though whole
 hash chain and call d_compare (proc_sys_compare) which checks them
 under system-wide spinlock (sysctl_lock).

 # time sysctl -a > /dev/null
 real    1m12.806s
 user    0m0.016s
 sys     1m12.400s

Currently only memory reclaimer could remove this garbage.
But without significant memory pressure this never happens.

This patch collects sysctl inodes into list on sysctl table header and
prunes all their dentries once that table unregisters.

Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@yandex-team.ru> writes:
> On 10.02.2017 10:47, Al Viro wrote:
>> how about >> the matching stats *after* that patch?
>
> dcache size doesn't grow endlessly, so stats are fine
>
> # sysctl fs.dentry-state
> fs.dentry-state = 92712	58376	45	0	0	0
>
> # time sysctl -a &>/dev/null
>
> real	0m0.013s
> user	0m0.004s
> sys	0m0.008s
Signed-off-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@yandex-team.ru>
Suggested-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>