• Kirill Smelkov's avatar
    fuse: require /dev/fuse reads to have enough buffer capacity · d4b13963
    Kirill Smelkov authored
    A FUSE filesystem server queues /dev/fuse sys_read calls to get
    filesystem requests to handle. It does not know in advance what would be
    that request as it can be anything that client issues - LOOKUP, READ,
    WRITE, ... Many requests are short and retrieve data from the
    filesystem. However WRITE and NOTIFY_REPLY write data into filesystem.
    
    Before getting into operation phase, FUSE filesystem server and kernel
    client negotiate what should be the maximum write size the client will
    ever issue. After negotiation the contract in between server/client is
    that the filesystem server then should queue /dev/fuse sys_read calls with
    enough buffer capacity to receive any client request - WRITE in
    particular, while FUSE client should not, in particular, send WRITE
    requests with > negotiated max_write payload. FUSE client in kernel and
    libfuse historically reserve 4K for request header. This way the
    contract is that filesystem server should queue sys_reads with
    4K+max_write buffer.
    
    If the filesystem server does not follow this contract, what can happen
    is that fuse_dev_do_read will see that request size is > buffer size,
    and then it will return EIO to client who issued the request but won't
    indicate in any way that there is a problem to filesystem server.
    This can be hard to diagnose because for some requests, e.g. for
    NOTIFY_REPLY which mimics WRITE, there is no client thread that is
    waiting for request completion and that EIO goes nowhere, while on
    filesystem server side things look like the kernel is not replying back
    after successful NOTIFY_RETRIEVE request made by the server.
    
    We can make the problem easy to diagnose if we indicate via error return to
    filesystem server when it is violating the contract.  This should not
    practically cause problems because if a filesystem server is using shorter
    buffer, writes to it were already very likely to cause EIO, and if the
    filesystem is read-only it should be too following FUSE_MIN_READ_BUFFER
    minimum buffer size.
    
    Please see [1] for context where the problem of stuck filesystem was hit
    for real (because kernel client was incorrectly sending more than
    max_write data with NOTIFY_REPLY; see also previous patch), how the
    situation was traced and for more involving patch that did not make it
    into the tree.
    
    [1] https://marc.info/?l=linux-fsdevel&m=155057023600853&w=2Signed-off-by: Kirill Smelkov's avatarKirill Smelkov <kirr@nexedi.com>
    Cc: Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@google.com>
    Cc: Jakob Unterwurzacher <jakobunt@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMiklos Szeredi <mszeredi@redhat.com>
    d4b13963
dev.c 54.9 KB