• Christoph Hellwig's avatar
    xfs: introduce an always_cow mode · 66ae56a5
    Christoph Hellwig authored
    Add a mode where XFS never overwrites existing blocks in place.  This
    is to aid debugging our COW code, and also put infatructure in place
    for things like possible future support for zoned block devices, which
    can't support overwrites.
    
    This mode is enabled globally by doing a:
    
        echo 1 > /sys/fs/xfs/debug/always_cow
    
    Note that the parameter is global to allow running all tests in xfstests
    easily in this mode, which would not easily be possible with a per-fs
    sysfs file.
    
    In always_cow mode persistent preallocations are disabled, and fallocate
    will fail when called with a 0 mode (with our without
    FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE), and not create unwritten extent for zeroed space
    when called with FALLOC_FL_ZERO_RANGE or FALLOC_FL_UNSHARE_RANGE.
    
    There are a few interesting xfstests failures when run in always_cow
    mode:
    
     - generic/392 fails because the bytes used in the file used to test
       hole punch recovery are less after the log replay.  This is
       because the blocks written and then punched out are only freed
       with a delay due to the logging mechanism.
     - xfs/170 will fail as the already fragile file streams mechanism
       doesn't seem to interact well with the COW allocator
     - xfs/180 xfs/182 xfs/192 xfs/198 xfs/204 and xfs/208 will claim
       the file system is badly fragmented, but there is not much we
       can do to avoid that when always writing out of place
     - xfs/205 fails because overwriting a file in always_cow mode
       will require new space allocation and the assumption in the
       test thus don't work anymore.
     - xfs/326 fails to modify the file at all in always_cow mode after
       injecting the refcount error, leading to an unexpected md5sum
       after the remount, but that again is expected
    Signed-off-by: default avatarChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarDarrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDarrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
    66ae56a5
xfs_aops.c 31.2 KB