Add the new file Documentation/filesystems/zonefs.txt to document zonefs
principles and user-space tool usage.
Signed-off-by: Damien Le Moal <damien.lemoal@xxxxxxx>
---
Documentation/filesystems/zonefs.txt | 150 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++
MAINTAINERS | 1 +
2 files changed, 151 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 Documentation/filesystems/zonefs.txt
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/zonefs.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/zonefs.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..e5d798f4087d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/zonefs.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,150 @@
+ZoneFS - Zone filesystem for Zoned block devices
+
+Overview
+========
+
+zonefs is a very simple file system exposing each zone of a zoned block device
+as a file. Unlike a regular file system with zoned block device support (e.g.
+f2fs), zonefs does not hide the sequential write constraint of zoned block
+devices to the user. Files representing sequential write zones of the device
+must be written sequentially starting from the end of the file (append only
+writes).
+
+As such, zonefs is in essence closer to a raw block device access interface
+than to a full featured POSIX file system. The goal of zonefs is to simplify
+the implementation of zoned block devices support in applications by replacing
+raw block device file accesses with a richer file API, avoiding relying on
+direct block device file ioctls which may be more obscure to developers. One
+example of this approach is the implementation of LSM (log-structured merge)
+tree structures (such as used in RocksDB and LevelDB) on zoned block devices by
+allowing SSTables to be stored in a zone file similarly to a regular file system
+rather than as a range of sectors of the entire disk. The introduction of the
+higher level construct "one file is one zone" can help reducing the amount of
+changes needed in the application as well as introducing support for different
+application programming languages.
+
+zonefs on-disk metadata is reduced to a super block which persistently stores a
+magic number and optional features flags and values. On mount, zonefs uses
+blkdev_report_zones() to obtain the device zone configuration and populates
+the mount point with a static file tree solely based on this information.
+E.g. file sizes come from the device zone type and write pointer offset managed
+by the device itself.
+
+The zone files created on mount have the following characteristics.
+1) Files representing zones of the same type are grouped together
+ under the same sub-directory:
+ * For conventional zones, the sub-directory "cnv" is used.
+ * For sequential write zones, the sub-directory "seq" is used.
+ These two directories are the only directories that exist in zonefs. Users
+ cannot create other directories and cannot rename nor delete the "cnv" and
+ "seq" sub-directories.
+2) The name of zone files is the number of the file within the zone type
+ sub-directory, in order of increasing zone start sector.
+3) The size of conventional zone files is fixed to the device zone size.
+ Conventional zone files cannot be truncated.
+4) The size of sequential zone files represent the file's zone write pointer
+ position relative to the zone start sector. Truncating these files is
+ allowed only down to 0, in wich case, the zone is reset to rewind the file
+ zone write pointer position to the start of the zone, or up to the zone size,
+ in which case the file's zone is transitioned to the FULL state (finish zone
+ operation).
+5) All read and write operations to files are not allowed beyond the file zone
+ size. Any access exceeding the zone size is failed with the -EFBIG error.
+6) Creating, deleting, renaming or modifying any attribute of files and
+ sub-directories is not allowed.
+
+Several optional features of zonefs can be enabled at format time.
+* Conventional zone aggregation: ranges of contiguous conventional zones can be
+ agregated into a single larger file instead of the default one file per zone.
+* File ownership: The owner UID and GID of zone files is by default 0 (root)
+ but can be changed to any valid UID/GID.
+* File access permissions: the default 640 access permissions can be changed.
+
+User Space Tools
+================
+
+The mkzonefs tool is used to format zoned block devices for use with zonefs.
+This tool is available on Github at:
+
+git@xxxxxxxxxx:damien-lemoal/zonefs-tools.git.
+
+zonefs-tools also includes a test suite which can be run against any zoned
+block device, including null_blk block device created with zoned mode.
+
+Example: the following formats a 15TB host-managed SMR HDD with 256 MB zones
+with the conventional zones aggregation feature enabled.
+
+# mkzonefs -o aggr_cnv /dev/sdX
+# mount -t zonefs /dev/sdX /mnt
+# ls -l /mnt/
+total 0
+dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 1 Nov 25 13:23 cnv
+dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 55356 Nov 25 13:23 seq
+
+The size of the zone files sub-directories indicate the number of files existing
+for each type of zones. In this example, there is only one conventional zone
+file (all conventional zones are agreggated under a single file).
+
+# ls -l /mnt/cnv
+total 137101312
+-rw-r----- 1 root root 140391743488 Nov 25 13:23 0
+
+This aggregated conventional zone file can be used as a regular file.
+
+# mkfs.ext4 /mnt/cnv/0
+# mount -o loop /mnt/cnv/0 /data
+
+The "seq" sub-directory grouping files for sequential write zones has in this
+example 55356 zones.
+
+# ls -lv /mnt/seq
+total 14511243264
+-rw-r----- 1 root root 0 Nov 25 13:23 0
+-rw-r----- 1 root root 0 Nov 25 13:23 1
+-rw-r----- 1 root root 0 Nov 25 13:23 2
+...
+-rw-r----- 1 root root 0 Nov 25 13:23 55354
+-rw-r----- 1 root root 0 Nov 25 13:23 55355
+
+For sequential write zone files, the file size changes as data is appended at
+the end of the file, similarly to any regular file system.
+
+# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/seq/0 bs=4096 count=1 conv=notrunc oflag=direct
+1+0 records in
+1+0 records out
+4096 bytes (4.1 kB, 4.0 KiB) copied, 1.05112 s, 3.9 kB/s
+
+# ls -l /mnt/seq/0
+-rw-r----- 1 root root 4096 Nov 25 13:23 /mnt/sdh/seq/0
+
+The written file can be truncated to the zone size, prventing any further write
+operation.
+
+# truncate -s 268435456 /mnt/seq/0
+# ls -l /mnt/seq/0
+-rw-r----- 1 root root 268435456 Nov 25 13:49 /mnt/seq/0
+
+Truncation to 0 size allows freeing the file zone storage space and restart
+append-writes to the file.
+
+# truncate -s 0 /mnt/seq/0
+# ls -l /mnt/seq/0
+-rw-r----- 1 root root 0 Nov 25 13:49 /mnt/seq/0
+
+Since files are statically mapped to zones on the disk, the number of blocks of
+a file as reported by stat() and fstat() indicates the size of the file zone.
+
+# stat /mnt/seq/0
+ File: /mnt/seq/0
+ Size: 0 Blocks: 524288 IO Block: 4096 regular empty file
+Device: 870h/2160d Inode: 50431 Links: 1
+Access: (0640/-rw-r-----) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
+Access: 2019-11-25 13:23:57.048971997 +0900
+Modify: 2019-11-25 13:52:25.553805765 +0900
+Change: 2019-11-25 13:52:25.553805765 +0900
+ Birth: -
+
+The number of blocks of the file ("Blocks") in units of 512B blocks gives the
+maximum file size of 524288 * 512 B = 256 MB, corresponding to the device zone
+size in this example. Of note is that the "IO block" field always indicates the
+minimum IO size for writes and corresponds to the device physical sector size.
diff --git a/MAINTAINERS b/MAINTAINERS
index 0641167ed2ea..1c760735e906 100644
--- a/MAINTAINERS
+++ b/MAINTAINERS
@@ -18290,6 +18290,7 @@ L: linux-fsdevel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
T: git git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dlemoal/zonefs.git
S: Maintained
F: fs/zonefs/
+F: Documentation/filesystems/zonefs.txt
ZPOOL COMPRESSED PAGE STORAGE API
M: Dan Streetman <ddstreet@xxxxxxxx>
--
2.23.0
