Hi all, this series implements a new O_ATOMIC flag for failure atomic writes to files. It is based on and tries to unify to earlier proposals, the first one for block devices by Chris Mason: https://lwn.net/Articles/573092/ and the second one for regular files, published by HP Research at Usenix FAST 2015: https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast15/technical-sessions/presentation/verma It adds a new O_ATOMIC flag for open, which requests writes to be failure-atomic, that is either the whole write makes it to persistent storage, or none of it, even in case of power of other failures. There are two implementation various of this: on block devices O_ATOMIC must be combined with O_(D)SYNC so that storage devices that can handle large writes atomically can simply do that without any additional work. This case is supported by NVMe. The second case is for file systems, where we simply write new blocks out of places and then remap them into the file atomically on either completion of an O_(D)SYNC write or when fsync is called explicitly. The semantics of the latter case are explained in detail at the Usenix paper above. Last but not least a new fcntl is implemented to provide information about I/O restrictions such as alignment requirements and the maximum atomic write size. The implementation is simple and clean, but I'm rather unhappy about the interface as it has too many failure modes to bullet proof. For one old kernels ignore unknown open flags silently, so applications have to check the F_IOINFO fcntl before, which is a bit of a killer. Because of that I've also not implemented any other validity checks yet, as they might make thing even worse when an open on a not supported file system or device fails, but not on an old kernel. Maybe we need a new open version that checks arguments properly first? Also I'm really worried about the NVMe failure modes - devices simply advertise an atomic write size, with no way for the device to know that the host requested a given write to be atomic, and thus no error reporting. This is made worse by NVMe 1.2 adding per-namespace atomic I/O parameters that devices can use to introduce additional odd alignment quirks - while there is some language in the spec requiring them not to weaken the per-controller guarantees it all looks rather weak and I'm not too confident in all implementations getting everything right. Last but not least this depends on a few XFS patches, so to actually apply / run the patches please use this git tree: git://git.infradead.org/users/hch/vfs.git O_ATOMIC Gitweb: http://git.infradead.org/users/hch/vfs.git/shortlog/refs/heads/O_ATOMIC -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-xfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
