Bug 1793533

This bug was initially created as a copy of Bug #1793527

I am copying this bug because: 

Also applies to RHEL 8.1

Description of problem:

It appears that a single "mount" operation on a single file system (including a "mount -o remount") makes systemd send 2 PropertiesChanged message per mount point seen on the system (even if the mount point is not touched).
This creates a huge systemd load, and potentially a huge load on DBus.

The root cause behind this is an absence of caching of the /proc/1/mountinfo table.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

systemd-219 AND systemd-239 (RHEL8)


How reproducible:

Always


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set up a system with 200 mount points on a "data" volume group

  # vgcreate data /dev/sdb
  # for i in $(seq 1 200); do lvcreate -n lv$i -L 10M data; mkfs.ext4 /dev/data/lv$i; echo "/dev/mapper/data-lv$i /data/lv$i ext4 defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab; mkdir -p /data/lv$i; done
  # systemctl daemon-reload
  # mount -a

2. Monitor systemd's "sendmsg" while performing 100 remounts of /data/lv1

  In a terminal:
  # timeout 1m strace -ttTvyy -o /tmp/systemd.strace -s 1024 -e sendmsg -p 1

  In another terminal:
  # for i in $(seq 1 100); do mount -o remount /data/lv1; sleep 0.1; done

3. Count the number of PropertiesChanged messages sent

  # grep -c PropertiesChanged /tmp/systemd.strace

Actual results:

40600


Expected results:

100 (ideally) or 200 (observed with a patch because there is a PropertiesChanged message for "/" seen, holding "/data/lv1")


Additional info:

The load is due to systemd parsing the whole /proc/1/mountinfo table and UDEV database to construct "description" field of corresponding Device units, requiring tons of malloc().
Finally all this gets sent through DBus "blindly" (no one cares about these messages).

A simple optimization (count dropping to 200) is to only send data when "description" field changes.

A better optimization would be to cache the content of /proc/1/mountinfo and only recompute the "description" field based on UDEV database for the modified mount points, but it's harder to do.