When I began work on the Posix layer it immediately became clear to
me that to integrate cleanly with the Linux VFS certain Solaris
specific things would have to go. One of these things was to elimate
as many Solaris specific types from the ZPL layer as possible. They
would be replaced with their Linux equivalents. This would not only
be good for performance, but for the general readability and health of
the code. The Solaris and Linux VFS are different beasts and should
be treated as such. Most of the code remains common for constructing
transactions and such, but there are subtle and important differenced
which need to be repsected.
This policy went quite for for certain types such as the vnode_t,
and it initially seemed to be working out well for the vattr_t. There
was a relatively small amount of related xvattr_t code I was forced to
comment out with HAVE_XVATTR. But it didn't look that hard to come
back soon and replace it all with a native Linux type.
However, after going doing this path with xvattr some distance it
clear that this code was woven in the ZPL more deeply than I thought.
In particular its hooks went very deep in to the ZPL replay code
and replacing it would not be as easy as I originally thought.
Rather than continue persuing replacing and removing this code I've
taken a step back and reevaluted things. This commit reverts many of
my previous commits which removed xvattr related code. It restores
much of the code to its original upstream state and now relies on
improved xvattr_t support in the zfs package itself.
The result of this is that much of the code which I had commented
out, which accidentally broke things like replay, is now back in
place and working. However, there may be a small performance
impact for getattr/setattr operations because they now require
a translation from native Linux to Solaris types. For now that's
a price I'm willing to pay. Once everything is completely functional
we can revisting the issue of removing the vattr_t/xvattr_t types.
Closes#111
It's worth taking a moment to describe how mmap is implemented
for zfs because it differs considerably from other Linux filesystems.
However, this issue is handled the same way under OpenSolaris.
The issue is that by design zfs bypasses the Linux page cache and
leaves all caching up to the ARC. This has been shown to work
well for the common read(2)/write(2) case. However, mmap(2)
is problem because it relies on being tightly integrated with the
page cache. To handle this we cache mmap'ed files twice, once in
the ARC and a second time in the page cache. The code is careful
to keep both copies synchronized.
When a file with an mmap'ed region is written to using write(2)
both the data in the ARC and existing pages in the page cache
are updated. For a read(2) data will be read first from the page
cache then the ARC if needed. Neither a write(2) or read(2) will
will ever result in new pages being added to the page cache.
New pages are added to the page cache only via .readpage() which
is called when the vfs needs to read a page off disk to back the
virtual memory region. These pages may be modified without
notifying the ARC and will be written out periodically via
.writepage(). This will occur due to either a sync or the usual
page aging behavior. Note because a read(2) of a mmap'ed file
will always check the page cache first even when the ARC is out
of date correct data will still be returned.
While this implementation ensures correct behavior it does have
have some drawbacks. The most obvious of which is that it
increases the required memory footprint when access mmap'ed
files. It also adds additional complexity to the code keeping
both caches synchronized.
Longer term it may be possible to cleanly resolve this wart by
mapping page cache pages directly on to the ARC buffers. The
Linux address space operations are flexible enough to allow
selection of which pages back a particular index. The trick
would be working out the details of which subsystem is in
charge, the ARC, the page cache, or both. It may also prove
helpful to move the ARC buffers to a scatter-gather lists
rather than a vmalloc'ed region.
Additionally, zfs_write/read_common() were used in the readpage
and writepage hooks because it was fairly easy. However, it
would be better to update zfs_fillpage and zfs_putapage to be
Linux friendly and use them instead.
A new flag is required for the zfs_rlock code to determine if
it is operation of the zvol of zpl dataset. This used to be
keyed off the zp->z_vnode, which was a hack to begin with, but
with the removal of vnodes we needed a dedicated flag.
I appologize in advance why to many things ended up in this commit.
When it could be seperated in to a whole series of commits teasing
that all apart now would take considerable time and I'm not sure
there's much merrit in it. As such I'll just summerize the intent
of the changes which are all (or partly) in this commit. Broadly
the intent is to remove as much Solaris specific code as possible
and replace it with native Linux equivilants. More specifically:
1) Replace all instances of zfsvfs_t with zfs_sb_t. While the
type is largely the same calling it private super block data
rather than a zfsvfs is more consistent with how Linux names
this. While non critical it makes the code easier to read when
your thinking in Linux friendly VFS terms.
2) Replace vnode_t with struct inode. The Linux VFS doesn't have
the notion of a vnode and there's absolutely no good reason to
create one. There are in fact several good reasons to remove it.
It just adds overhead on Linux if we were to manage one, it
conplicates the code, and it likely will lead to bugs so there's
a good change it will be out of date. The code has been updated
to remove all need for this type.
3) Replace all vtype_t's with umode types. Along with this shift
all uses of types to mode bits. The Solaris code would pass a
vtype which is redundant with the Linux mode. Just update all the
code to use the Linux mode macros and remove this redundancy.
4) Remove using of vn_* helpers and replace where needed with
inode helpers. The big example here is creating iput_aync to
replace vn_rele_async. Other vn helpers will be addressed as
needed but they should be be emulated. They are a Solaris VFS'ism
and should simply be replaced with Linux equivilants.
5) Update znode alloc/free code. Under Linux it's common to
embed the inode specific data with the inode itself. This removes
the need for an extra memory allocation. In zfs this information
is called a znode and it now embeds the inode with it. Allocators
have been updated accordingly.
6) Minimal integration with the vfs flags for setting up the
super block and handling mount options has been added this
code will need to be refined but functionally it's all there.
This will be the first and last of these to large to review commits.
For the moment we have left ZFS unchanged and it updates many values
as part of the znode. However, some of these values should be set
in the inode. For the moment this is handled by adding a function
called zfs_inode_update() which updates the inode based on the znode.
This is considered a workaround until we can systematically go
through the ZFS code and have it directly update the inode. At
which point zfs_update_inode() can be dropped entirely. Keeping
two copies of the same data isn't only inefficient it's a breeding
ground for bugs.
Under Linux the convention for filesystem specific data structure is
to embed it along with the generic vfs data structure. This differs
significantly from Solaris.
Since we want to integrates as cleanly with the Linux VFS as possible.
This changes modifies zfs_znode_alloc() to allocate a znode with an
embedded inode for use with the generic VFS. This is done by calling
iget_locked() which will allocate a new inode if needed by calling
sb->alloc_inode(). This function allocates enough memory for a
znode_t by returns a pointer to the inode structure for Linux's VFS.
This function is also responsible for setting the callback
znode->z_set_ops_inodes() which is used to register the correct
handlers for the inode.
One of the neat tricks an autoconf style project is capable of
is allow configurion/building in a directory other than the
source directory. The major advantage to this is that you can
build the project various different ways while making changes
in a single source tree.
For example, this project is designed to work on various different
Linux distributions each of which work slightly differently. This
means that changes need to verified on each of those supported
distributions perferably before the change is committed to the
public git repo.
Using nfs and custom build directories makes this much easier.
I now have a single source tree in nfs mounted on several different
systems each running a supported distribution. When I make a
change to the source base I suspect may break things I can
concurrently build from the same source on all the systems each
in their own subdirectory.
wget -c http://github.com/downloads/behlendorf/zfs/zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
tar -xzf zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
cd zfs-x-y-z
------------------------- run concurrently ----------------------
<ubuntu system> <fedora system> <debian system> <rhel6 system>
mkdir ubuntu mkdir fedora mkdir debian mkdir rhel6
cd ubuntu cd fedora cd debian cd rhel6
../configure ../configure ../configure ../configure
make make make make
make check make check make check make check
This change also moves many of the include headers from individual
incude/sys directories under the modules directory in to a single
top level include directory. This has the advantage of making
the build rules cleaner and logically it makes a bit more sense.
