On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 10:33 +1000, David Chinner wrote: > On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 04:32:57PM -0700, Mingming Cao wrote: > > On Wed, 2007-05-30 at 10:21 +1000, David Chinner wrote: > > > On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 06:25:31PM +0200, Jean noel Cordenner wrote: > > > > Hi, > > > > > > > > This is an update of the i_version patch. > > > > The i_version field is a 64bit counter that is set on every inode > > > > creation and that is incremented every time the inode data is modified > > > > (similarly to the "ctime" time-stamp). > > > > > > My understanding (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that the > > > requirements are much more rigourous than simply incrementing an in > > > memory counter on every change. i.e. the this counter has to > > > survive server crashes intact so clients never see the counter go > > > backwards. That means version number changes need to be journalled > > > along with the operation that caused the change of the version > > > number. > > > > > Yeah, the i_version is the in memeory counter. From the patch it looks > > like the counter is being updated inside ext4_mark_iloc_dirty(), so it > > is being journalled and being flush to on-disk ext4 inode structure > > immediately (On-disk ext4 inode structure is being modified/expanded to > > store the counter in the first patch). > > Ok, that catches most things (I missed that), but the version number still > needs to change on file data changes, right? So if we are overwriting the > file, we're calling __mark_inode_dirty(I_DIRTY_PAGES) which means you don't > get the callout and so the version number doesn't change or get logged. In > that case, the version number is not doing what it needs to do, right? > Hmm, maybe I missed something... but looking at the code again, in the case of overwrite (file date updated),it seems the ctime/mtime is being updated and the inode is being dirtied, so the version number is being updated. vfs_write()->.. ->__generic_file_aio_write_nolock() ->file_update_time() ->mark_inode_dirty_sync() ->__mark_inode_dirty(I_DIRTY_SYNC) ->ext4_dirty_inode() ->ext4_mark_inode_dirty() Regards, Mingming - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
