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

J. Bruce Fields
2022-09-12T14:47:38Z

On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 10:02:27AM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> On Mon, 2022-09-12 at 09:51 -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 08:55:04AM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > > Because of the "seen" flag, we have a 63 bit counter to play with. Could
> > > we use a similar scheme to the one we use to handle when "jiffies"
> > > wraps? Assume that we'd never compare two values that were more than
> > > 2^62 apart? We could add i_version_before/i_version_after macros to make
> > > it simple to handle this.
> >
> > As far as I recall the protocol just assumes it can never wrap. I guess
> > you could add a new change_attr_type that works the way you describe.
> > But without some new protocol clients aren't going to know what to do
> > with a change attribute that wraps.
> >
>
> Right, I think that's the case now, and with contemporary hardware that
> shouldn't ever happen, but in 10 years when we're looking at femtosecond
> latencies, could this be different? I don't know.

That doesn't sound likely. We probably need not just 2^63 writes to a
single file, but a dependent sequence of 2^63 interspersed writes and
change attribute reads.

Then there's the question of how many crashes and remounts are possible
for a single filesystem in the worst case.

>
> > I think this just needs to be designed so that wrapping is impossible in
> > any realistic scenario. I feel like that's doable?
> >
> > If we feel we have to catch that case, the only 100% correct behavior
> > would probably be to make the filesystem readonly.
>
> What would be the recourse at that point? Rebuild the fs from scratch, I
> guess?

I guess.

--b.