From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Lehman Subject: Re: Why add the general notification queue and its sources Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2019 16:09:58 -0400 Message-ID: References: <156763534546.18676.3530557439501101639.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk> <17703.1567702907@warthog.procyon.org.uk> <11667f69-fbb5-28d2-3c31-7f865f2b93e5@redhat.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Ray Strode , Steven Whitehouse Cc: Linus Torvalds , David Howells , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Nicolas Dichtel , raven@themaw.net, keyrings@vger.kernel.org, linux-usb@vger.kernel.org, linux-block , Christian Brauner , LSM List , linux-fsdevel , Linux API , Linux List Kernel Mailing , Ian Kent List-Id: linux-api@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 2019-09-05 at 14:51 -0400, Ray Strode wrote: > Hi, > > On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 2:37 PM Steven Whitehouse > wrote: > > The original reason for the mount notification mechanism was so > > that we > > are able to provide information to GUIs and similar filesystem and > > storage management tools, matching the state of the filesystem with > > the > > state of the underlying devices. This is part of a larger project > > entitled "Project Springfield" to try and provide better management > > tools for storage and filesystems. I've copied David Lehman in, > > since he > > can provide a wider view on this topic. > So one problem that I've heard discussed before is what happens in a > thinp > setup when the disk space is overallocated and gets used up. IIRC, > the > volumes just sort of eat themselves? > > Getting proper notification of looming catastrophic failure to the > workstation user > before it's too late would be useful, indeed. > > I don't know if this new mechanism dhowells has development can help > with that, My understanding is that there is already a dm devent that gets sent when the low water mark is crossed for a thin pool, but there is nothing in userspace that knows how to effectively get the user's attention at that time. > and/or if solving that problem is part of the Project Springfield > initiative or not. Do you > know off hand? We have been looking into building a userspace event notification service (for storage, initially) to aggregate and add context to low- level events such as these, providing a single source for all kinds of storage events with an excellent signal:noise ratio. Thin pool exhaustion is high on the list of problems we would want to address. David