Re: Starting a grad project that may change kernel VFS. Early research

[Bryan Donlan <bdonlan@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 12:23 AM, Jeff Shanab<jshanab@earthlink.net> wrote:
> So does mv essentially become copy when between mounts?

Yes, essentially.

>>
>>> I need to look at the cashing and how we handle changes already.  Do we
>>> write things immediately all the time? Then why must I "sync" before
>>> unmount. hummmm
>>>
>>
>> You don't need to sync before umount. umount automatically syncs the
>> filesystem it's applied on after it's removed from the namespace, but
>> before the umount completes. Additionally, dirty buffers and pages are
>> written back automatically based on memory pressure and timeouts - see
>> /proc/sys/vm/dirty_* for the knobs for this.
>>
> I know it now does the sync for you, but the fact a sync must be done
> indicates there are buffers not written, correct?

Generally speaking the umount will actually make some buffers dirty
when, eg, setting a 'filesystem is clean' flag. There may also be
dirty buffers left over from prior activity.

>>>> In addition, how will you handle hard links?  An inode can have
>>>> multiple hard links in different directories, and there is no way to
>>>> find all of the directories which might contain a hard link to a
>>>> particular inode, short of doing a brute force search.  Hence if you
>>>> have a file living in src/linux/v2.6.29/README, and it is a hard link
>>>> to ~/hacker/linux/README, and a program appends data to the file
>>>> ~/hacker/linux/README, this would also change the result of running du
>>>> -s src/linux/v2.6.29; however, there's no way for your extension to
>>>> know that.
>>>>
>>
>> ^^^ don't skip this part, it's absolutely critical, the biggest
>> problem with your proposal, and you can't just handwave it away.
>>
> I will sleep on the hard link issue. There must be an answer as DU must
> handle this.
> I can see where if I can't distinquish between which is the hard link
> and which is not becasue they are implemented the same.
>
> First think is to run an experiment in the morning
>
>    test/foo/bar/file
>    test/bar/foo/file
>    where file is the same file close to the disk block size.
>    does 'du -s in foo' + 'du -s in bar'  = 'du -s' in test?

No. du -s in test will count 'file' only once, unless -l is passed.

>
>> One thing you may want to look into is the new fanotify API[1] - it
>> allows a userspace program to monitor and/or block certain filesystem
>> events of interest. You may be able to implement a prototype of your
>> space-usage-caching system in userspace this way without needing to
>> modify the kernel. Or implement it as a FUSE layered filesystem. In
>> the latter case you may be able to make a reverse index of sorts for
>> hardlink handling - but this carries with it quite a bit of overhead.
>>
> FUSE is an option I was keeping open.
> Since I can dedicate a mountpoint to a file system and mount and umount
> it and load and unload a kernel module FUSE, seemed like extra work with
> little benefit.
> That does sound like a lot of overhead.

It is additional overhead, but writing code for userspace is a lot
easier as you do not need to deal with kernel locking and low-memory
deadlock issues, and can use any userspace libraries you want. You
also won't have to worry about crashing the system and having to
reboot if you make a mistake. It's a good way to prove the concept is
sound before proposing it in a more concrete form to filesystem
developers.