Re: [PATCH 4/8] vfs: Add superblock notifications

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi
2020-12-11T21:44:50Z

Dave,

Thanks a lot for the very detailed review.

> On Mon, Dec 07, 2020 at 09:31:13PM -0300, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi wrote:
>> From: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
>>
>> Add a superblock event notification facility whereby notifications about
>> superblock events, such as I/O errors (EIO), quota limits being hit
>> (EDQUOT) and running out of space (ENOSPC) can be reported to a monitoring
>> process asynchronously. Note that this does not cover vfsmount topology
>> changes. watch_mount() is used for that.
>
> watch_mount() is not in the upstream tree, nor is it defined in this
> patch set.

That is my mistake, not the author's. I picked this from a longer series that has
a watch_mount implementation, but didn't include it. Only the commit message
is bad, not the patch absence.

>> Records are of the following format:
>>
>> struct superblock_notification {
>> struct watch_notification watch;
>> __u64 sb_id;
>> } *n;
>>
>> Where:
>>
>> n->watch.type will be WATCH_TYPE_SB_NOTIFY.
>>
>> n->watch.subtype will indicate the type of event, such as
>> NOTIFY_SUPERBLOCK_READONLY.
>>
>> n->watch.info & WATCH_INFO_LENGTH will indicate the length of the
>> record.
>>
>> n->watch.info & WATCH_INFO_ID will be the fifth argument to
>> watch_sb(), shifted.
>>
>> n->watch.info & NOTIFY_SUPERBLOCK_IS_NOW_RO will be used for
>> NOTIFY_SUPERBLOCK_READONLY, being set if the superblock becomes
>> R/O, and being cleared otherwise.
>>
>> n->sb_id will be the ID of the superblock, as can be retrieved with
>> the fsinfo() syscall, as part of the fsinfo_sb_notifications
>> attribute in the watch_id field.
>>
>> Note that it is permissible for event records to be of variable length -
>> or, at least, the length may be dependent on the subtype. Note also that
>> the queue can be shared between multiple notifications of various types.
>
> /me puts on his "We really, really, REALLY suck at APIs" hat.
>
> This adds a new syscall that has a complex structure associated with
> in. This needs a full man page specification written for it
> describing the parameters, the protocol structures, behaviour, etc
> before we can really review this. It really also needs full test
> infrastructure for every aspect of the syscall written from the man
> page (not the implementation) for fstests so that we end up with a
> consistent implementation for every filesystem that implements these
> watches.

I see. I was thinking the other way around, getting a design accepted
by you all before writing down documentation, but that makes a lot of
sense. In fact, I'm taking a step back and writing a text proposal,
without patches, such that we can agree on the main points before I
start coding.

> Other things:
>
> - Scoping: inode/block related information is not "superblock"
> information. What about errors in non-inode related objects?

The previous RFC separated inode error notifications from other types,
but my idea was to have different notifications types for each object.

> - offets into files/devices/objects need to be in bytes, not blocks
> - errors can span multiple contiguous blocks, so the notification
> needs to report the -byte range- the error corresponds to.
> - superblocks can have multiple block devices under them with
> individual address ranges. Hence we need {object,dev,offset,len}
> to uniquely identify where an error occurred in a filesystem.
> - userspace face structures need padding and flags/version/size
> information so we can tell what shape the structure being passed
> is. It is guaranteed that we will want to expand the structure
> definitions in future, maybe even deprecate some...
> - syscall has no flags field.
> - syscall is of "at" type (relative path via dfd) so probably shoudl
> be called "watch..._at()"

will do all the above.

>
> Fundamentally, though, I'm struggling to understand what the
> difference between watch_mount() and watch_sb() is going to be.
> "superblock" watches seem like the wrong abstraction for a path
> based watch interface. Superblocks can be shared across multiple
> disjoint paths, subvolumes and even filesystems.

As far as I understand the original patchset, watch_mount was designed
to monitor mountpoint operations (mount, umount,.. ) in a sub-tree,
while watch_sb monitors filesystem operations and errors. I'm not
working with watch_mount, my current interest is in having a
notifications mechanism for filesystem errors, which seemed to fit
nicely with the watch_sb patchset for watch_queue.

> The path based user API is really asking to watch a mount, not a
> superblock. We don't otherwise expose superblocks to userspace at
> all, so this seems like the API is somewhat exposing internal kernel
> implementation behind mounts. However, there -is- a watch_mount()
> syscall floating around somewhere, so it makes me wonder exactly why
> we need a second syscall and interface protocol to expose
> essentially the same path-based watch information to userspace.

I think these are indeed different syscalls, but maybe a bit misnamed.

If not by path, how could we uniquely identify an entire filesystem?
Maybe pointing to a block device that has a valid filesystem and in the
case of fs spawning through multiple devices, consider all of them? But
that would not work for some misc filesystems, like tmpfs.

> Without having that syscall the same patchset, or a reference to
> that patchset (and man page documenting the interface), I have no
> idea what it does or why it is different or why it can't be used for
> these error notifications....

As a short summary, My goal is an error reporting mechanism for ext4
(preferably that can also be used by other filesystems) that allows a
userspace application to monitor errors on the filesystem without losing
information and without having to parse a convoluted dmesg. The
watch_queue API seem to expose exactly the infrastructure for this kind
of thing. As I said, I'm gonna send a proposal with more details
because, I'd really like to have something that can be used by several
filesystems.

--
Gabriel Krisman Bertazi