Re: e2fsprogs and blocks outside i_size

Aneesh Kumar K.V
2008-07-21T05:59:26Z

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 11:08:25PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> On Jul 18, 2008 08:37 -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 05:41:30PM +0530, Aneesh Kumar K.V wrote:
> > > With fallocate FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE option, when we write to prealloc
> > > space and if we hit ENOSPC when trying to insert the extent,
> > > we actually zero out the extent. That means we can have blocks
> > > outside i_size for an inode.
>
> To clarify, doesn't FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE put the extent beyond i_size,
> regardless of whether the ENOSPC problem is hit?

But the extent in that case would be marked as uninit using the extent
len. So e2fsck can check for that.

>
> > > I guess e2fsck currently doesn't handle this. Or should we fix kernel
> > > to update i_size to the right value if we do a zero out of the extent ?
> > >
> > > With fallocate if the prealloc area is small we also aggressively zeroout.
> > > This was needed so that a random write pattern on falloc area doesn't
> > > results in too many extents. That also can result in the above
> > > error on fsck.
> >
> > It would seem to me that e2fsck should be fixed to not complain about
> > blocks outside of i_size, *if* the blocks in question are marked as
> > being unitialized.
>
> Yes, I think that is the right approach.

That is fine for extents marked uninit. But when we zero out we zero out
the full extent. So that means a write of few bytes can result in blocks
being zeroed out outside i_size. My question was how e2fsck can handle
this. Because the extent will no more be marked as uninit and there
would be blocks outside i_size all carrying zero.

>
> > I suppose the other hack we could do is have e2fsck check the blocks
> > that are outside of i_size, and if they are all zero and extents are
> > involved, that it's a case of pre-allocated blocks that needed to be
> > zero'ed for some reason, as opposed to a corrupted i_size. That seems
> > to be a really gross hack, though.
>
> Yuck, with the added problem that there is no guarantee that these
> data blocks ARE all zero.
>

-aneesh