Re: [RFC 02/15] vfs: Change all structures to support 64 bit time

Arnd Bergmann
2016-01-18T19:53:34Z

On Monday 18 January 2016 09:40:12 Deepa Dinamani wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 2:56 AM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:
> > On Sunday 17 January 2016 22:09:26 Deepa Dinamani wrote:
> >> Based on the discussion, here is how I propose to proceed:
> > Sounds good to me. Step 3 of course is the hard one, and you may run into
> > further problems with it, as we both have in our previous attempts to
> > crack this nut, but with step 2 before it that may become manageable.
>
> Right, I don't agree with this approach and it will get very ugly.
> I was just proposing a way to move forward because it looked like we are at
> a stalemate.
>
> Maybe xfs doesn't have these problems but some of the other fs-es do.
> And, these will need changing twice: before(to use 64 bit arithmetic
> like cifs, use current_fs_time() like fat etc) and along with vfs.
>
> It will unnecessarily bloat the vfs switching to timespec64 code.
> Below are 3 example filesystem changes that illustrates this problem:
>
> Ext4:
> 1. cr_time
> 2. Encode and Decode api's
>
> Both these ext4 changes need to made along with vfs change to ext4.
> Many such fs exists and will make the vfs switch over very ugly.
>
> FAT:
> 1. fat_time_fat2unix, fat_time_unix2fat
>
> Both the above 2 functions also will have to be modified along with vfs.
>
> CIFS:
> 1. struct cifs_fscache_inode_auxdata - last_write_time, last_change_time
> 2. cifs_fattr
> 3. cifs_NTtimeToUnix, cifs_UnixTimeToNT, cnvrtDosUnixTm
>
> All the above cifs changes also need to be changed in the same patch as
> vfs switch to timespec64.
>
> I don't think there is any nicer way to do this without having an
> encapsulation layer like inode_timespec or accessors you mentioned to
> change the underlying data type in the vfs.
>
> Also, this scheme is so outrageously ugly that you can easily miss
> some change. There is no way of verifying the approach theoretically.
> Of course, I will be using kernel tests like in other cases.

I agree it's ugly and fragile to have one huge patch, but I think the
best way to illustrate it is to make it as small as possible and
then talk about whether that makes it acceptable or how we can
work around the problems.

Do you have an estimate what portion of the file systems need any
changes at all before we can flip over VFS to the new types?

If it's less than half, we you can try yet another variation (nothing
new really, we are always dealing with the same few tricks):

1. add timestamp range checking and clamping
2. kill off CURRENT_TIME
3. for each file system that uses struct timespec internally to pass
around inode timestamps, do one patch that adds a
timespec_to_inode_time() and vice versa, which gets defined like

static inline struct timespec timespec_to_inode(struct timespec t)
{
return t;
}

4. change the internal representation in one patch that changes those
helpers along with the struct members.
5. change the file systems to use timespec64 internally instead of
timespec.

Arnd