On Fri, 09 Sep 2022, Jeff Layton wrote: > On Thu, 2022-09-08 at 14:22 -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote: > > On Thu, Sep 08, 2022 at 01:40:11PM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote: > > > Yeah, ok. That does make some sense. So we would mix this into the > > > i_version instead of the ctime when it was available. Preferably, we'd > > > mix that in when we store the i_version rather than adding it afterward. > > > > > > Ted, how would we access this? Maybe we could just add a new (generic) > > > super_block field for this that ext4 (and other filesystems) could > > > populate at mount time? > > > > Couldn't the filesystem just return an ino_version that already includes > > it? > > > > Yes. That's simple if we want to just fold it in during getattr. If we > want to fold that into the values stored on disk, then I'm a little less > clear on how that will work. > > Maybe I need a concrete example of how that will work: > > Suppose we have an i_version value X with the previous crash counter > already factored in that makes it to disk. We hand out a newer version > X+1 to a client, but that value never makes it to disk. As I understand it, the crash counter would NEVER appear in the on-disk i_version. The crash counter is stable while a filesystem is mounted so is the same when loading an inode from disk and when writing it back. When loading, add crash counter to on-disk i_version to provide in-memory i_version. when storing, subtract crash counter from in-memory i_version to provide on-disk i_version. "add" and "subtract" could be any reversible hash, and its inverse. I would probably shift the crash counter up 16 and add/subtract. NeilBrown > > The machine crashes and comes back up, and we get a query for i_version > and it comes back as X. Fine, it's an old version. Now there is a write. > What do we do to ensure that the new value doesn't collide with X+1? > -- > Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx> >