Re: [RFC v2 1/4] fs: Add generic file system event notifications

Beata Michalska
2015-04-28T14:46:54Z

On 04/28/2015 04:09 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 03:56:53PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
>> On Mon 27-04-15 17:37:11, Greg KH wrote:
>>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 05:08:27PM +0200, Beata Michalska wrote:
>>>> On 04/27/2015 04:24 PM, Greg KH wrote:
>>>>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 01:51:41PM +0200, Beata Michalska wrote:
>>>>>> Introduce configurable generic interface for file
>>>>>> system-wide event notifications, to provide file
>>>>>> systems with a common way of reporting any potential
>>>>>> issues as they emerge.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The notifications are to be issued through generic
>>>>>> netlink interface by newly introduced multicast group.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Threshold notifications have been included, allowing
>>>>>> triggering an event whenever the amount of free space drops
>>>>>> below a certain level - or levels to be more precise as two
>>>>>> of them are being supported: the lower and the upper range.
>>>>>> The notifications work both ways: once the threshold level
>>>>>> has been reached, an event shall be generated whenever
>>>>>> the number of available blocks goes up again re-activating
>>>>>> the threshold.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The interface has been exposed through a vfs. Once mounted,
>>>>>> it serves as an entry point for the set-up where one can
>>>>>> register for particular file system events.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Signed-off-by: Beata Michalska <b.michalska@samsung.com>
>>>>>> ---
>>>>>> Documentation/filesystems/events.txt | 231 ++++++++++
>>>>>> fs/Makefile | 1 +
>>>>>> fs/events/Makefile | 6 +
>>>>>> fs/events/fs_event.c | 770 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>>>>> fs/events/fs_event.h | 25 ++
>>>>>> fs/events/fs_event_netlink.c | 99 +++++
>>>>>> fs/namespace.c | 1 +
>>>>>> include/linux/fs.h | 6 +-
>>>>>> include/linux/fs_event.h | 58 +++
>>>>>> include/uapi/linux/fs_event.h | 54 +++
>>>>>> include/uapi/linux/genetlink.h | 1 +
>>>>>> net/netlink/genetlink.c | 7 +-
>>>>>> 12 files changed, 1257 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>>>>>> create mode 100644 Documentation/filesystems/events.txt
>>>>>> create mode 100644 fs/events/Makefile
>>>>>> create mode 100644 fs/events/fs_event.c
>>>>>> create mode 100644 fs/events/fs_event.h
>>>>>> create mode 100644 fs/events/fs_event_netlink.c
>>>>>> create mode 100644 include/linux/fs_event.h
>>>>>> create mode 100644 include/uapi/linux/fs_event.h
>>>>>
>>>>> Any reason why you just don't do uevents for the block devices today,
>>>>> and not create a new type of netlink message and userspace tool required
>>>>> to read these?
>>>>
>>>> The idea here is to have support for filesystems with no backing device as well.
>>>> Parsing the message with libnl is really simple and requires few lines of code
>>>> (sample application has been presented in the initial version of this RFC)
>>>
>>> I'm not saying it's not "simple" to parse, just that now you are doing
>>> something that requires a different tool. If you have a block device,
>>> you should be able to emit uevents for it, you don't need a backing
>>> device, we handle virtual filesystems in /sys/block/ just fine :)
>>>
>>> People already have tools that listen to libudev for system monitoring
>>> and management, why require them to hook up to yet-another-library? And
>>> what is going to provide the ability for multiple userspace tools to
>>> listen to these netlink messages in case you have more than one program
>>> that wants to watch for these things (i.e. multiple desktop filesystem
>>> monitoring tools, system-health checkers, etc.)?
>> As much as I understand your concerns I'm not convinced uevent interface
>> is a good fit. There are filesystems that don't have underlying block
>> device - think of e.g. tmpfs or filesystems working directly on top of
>> flash devices. These still want to send notification to userspace (one of
>> primary motivation for this interfaces was so that tmpfs can notify about
>> something). And creating some fake nodes in /sys/block for tmpfs and
>> similar filesystems seems like doing more harm than good to me...
>
> If these are "fake" block devices, what's going to be present in the
> block major/minor fields of the netlink message? For some reason I
> thought it was a required field, and because of that, I thought we had a
> "real" filesystem somewhere to refer to, otherwise how would userspace
> know what filesystem was creating these events?
>
> What am I missing here?
>
> confused,
>
> greg k-h
>

For those 'fake' block devs, upon mount, get_anon_bdev will assign
the major:minor numbers. Userspace might get those through stat.

BR
Beata