Re: [RFC][PATCH] ChunkFS: fs fission for faster fsck

[David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 04:53:11PM -0500, Amit Gud wrote:
> Nikita Danilov wrote:
> >Maybe I failed to describe the problem presicely.
> >
> >Suppose that all chunks have been checked. After that, for every inode
> >I0 having continuations I1, I2, ... In, one has to check that every
> >logical block is presented in at most one of these inodes. For this one
> >has to read I0, with all its indirect (double-indirect, triple-indirect)
> >blocks, then read I1 with all its indirect blocks, etc. And to repeat
> >this for every inode with continuations.
> >
> >In the worst case (every inode has a continuation in every chunk) this
> >obviously is as bad as un-chunked fsck. But even in the average case,
> >total amount of io necessary for this operation is proportional to the
> >_total_ file system size, rather than to the chunk size.
> >
> 
> Perhaps, I should talk about how continuation inodes are managed / 
> located on disk. (This is how it is in my current implementation)
> 
> Right now, there is no distinction between an inode and continuation 
> inode (also referred to as 'cnode' below), except for the 
> EXT2_IS_CONT_FL flag. Every inode holds a list of static number of 
> inodes, currently limited to 4.
> 
> The structure looks like this:
> 
>  ----------		----------
> | cnode 0  |---------->| cnode 0  |----------> to another cnode or NULL
>  ----------		----------
> | cnode 1  |-----      | cnode 1  |-----
>  ----------	|	----------	|
> | cnode 2  |-- |      | cnode 2  |--   |
>  ----------  | |	----------  |   |
> | cnode 3  | | |      | cnode 3  | |   |
>  ----------  | |	----------  |   |
> 	  |  |  |		 |  |   |
> 
> 	   inodes		inodes or NULL

How do you recover if fsfuzzer takes out a cnode in the chain? The
chunk is marked clean, but clearly corrupted and needs fixing and
you don't know what it was pointing at.  Hence you have a pointer to
a trashed cnode *somewhere* that you need to find and fix, and a
bunch of orphaned cnodes that nobody points to *somewhere else* in
the filesystem that you have to find. That's a full scan fsck case,
isn't?

It seems that any sort of damage to the underlying storage (e.g.
media error, I/O error or user brain explosion) results in the need
to do a full fsck and hence chunkfs gives you no benefit in this
case.

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
Principal Engineer
SGI Australian Software Group