Re: [man-pages RFC PATCH v4] statx, inode: document the new STATX_INO_VERSION field

Jeff Layton
2022-09-12T12:59:42Z

On Mon, 2022-09-12 at 08:54 -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 07:42:16AM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > A scheme like that could work. It might be hard to do it without a
> > spinlock or something, but maybe that's ok. Thinking more about how we'd
> > implement this in the underlying filesystems:
> >
> > To do this we'd need 2 64-bit fields in the on-disk and in-memory
> > superblocks for ext4, xfs and btrfs. On the first mount after a crash,
> > the filesystem would need to bump s_version_max by the significant
> > increment (2^40 bits or whatever). On a "clean" mount, it wouldn't need
> > to do that.
> >
> > Would there be a way to ensure that the new s_version_max value has made
> > it to disk? Bumping it by a large value and hoping for the best might be
> > ok for most cases, but there are always outliers, so it might be
> > worthwhile to make an i_version increment wait on that if necessary.
>
> I was imagining that when you recognize you're getting close, you kick
> off something which writes s_version_max+2^40 to disk, and then updates
> s_version_max to that new value on success of the write.
>

Ok, that makes sense.

> The code that increments i_version checks to make sure it wouldn't
> exceed s_version_max. If it would, something has gone wrong--a write
> has failed or taken a long time--so it waits or errors out or something,
> depending on desired filesystem behavior in that case.
>

Maybe could just throw a big scary pr_warn too? I'd have to think about
how we'd want to handle this case.

> No locking required in the normal case?

Yeah, maybe not.
--
Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>