• Dharmendra Singh's avatar
    fuse: allow non-extending parallel direct writes on the same file · 15352405
    Dharmendra Singh authored
    In general, as of now, in FUSE, direct writes on the same file are
    serialized over inode lock i.e we hold inode lock for the full duration of
    the write request.  I could not find in fuse code and git history a comment
    which clearly explains why this exclusive lock is taken for direct writes.
    Following might be the reasons for acquiring an exclusive lock but not be
    limited to
    
     1) Our guess is some USER space fuse implementations might be relying on
        this lock for serialization.
    
     2) The lock protects against file read/write size races.
    
     3) Ruling out any issues arising from partial write failures.
    
    This patch relaxes the exclusive lock for direct non-extending writes only.
    File size extending writes might not need the lock either, but we are not
    entirely sure if there is a risk to introduce any kind of regression.
    Furthermore, benchmarking with fio does not show a difference between patch
    versions that take on file size extension a) an exclusive lock and b) a
    shared lock.
    
    A possible example of an issue with i_size extending writes are write error
    cases.  Some writes might succeed and others might fail for file system
    internal reasons - for example ENOSPACE.  With parallel file size extending
    writes it _might_ be difficult to revert the action of the failing write,
    especially to restore the right i_size.
    
    With these changes, we allow non-extending parallel direct writes on the
    same file with the help of a flag called FOPEN_PARALLEL_DIRECT_WRITES.  If
    this flag is set on the file (flag is passed from libfuse to fuse kernel as
    part of file open/create), we do not take exclusive lock anymore, but
    instead use a shared lock that allows non-extending writes to run in
    parallel.  FUSE implementations which rely on this inode lock for
    serialization can continue to do so and serialized direct writes are still
    the default.  Implementations that do not do write serialization need to be
    updated and need to set the FOPEN_PARALLEL_DIRECT_WRITES flag in their file
    open/create reply.
    
    On patch review there were concerns that network file systems (or vfs
    multiple mounts of the same file system) might have issues with parallel
    writes.  We believe this is not the case, as this is just a local lock,
    which network file systems could not rely on anyway.  I.e. this lock is
    just for local consistency.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDharmendra Singh <dsingh@ddn.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarBernd Schubert <bschubert@ddn.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMiklos Szeredi <mszeredi@redhat.com>
    15352405
file.c 80.1 KB