Hi all, As I've mentioned in past comments on the parent pointers patchset, the proposed ondisk parent pointer format presents a major difficulty for online directory repair. This difficulty derives from encoding the directory offset of the dirent that the parent pointer is mirroring. Recall that parent pointers are stored in extended attributes: (parent_ino, parent_gen, diroffset) -> (dirent_name) If the directory is rebuilt, the offsets of the new directory entries must match the diroffset encoded in the parent pointer, or the filesystem becomes inconsistent. There are a few ways to solve this problem. One approach would be to augment the directory addname function to take a diroffset and try to create the new entry at that offset. This will not work if the original directory became corrupt and the parent pointers were written out with impossible diroffsets (e.g. overlapping). Requiring matching diroffsets also prevents reorganization and compaction of directories. This could be remedied by recording the parent pointer diroffset updates necessary to retain consistency, and using the logged parent pointer replace function to rewrite parent pointers as necessary. This is a poor choice from a performance perspective because the logged xattr updates must be committed in the same transaction that commits the new directory structure. If there are a large number of diroffset updates, then the directory commit could take an even longer time. Worse yet, if the logged xattr updates fill up the transaction, repair will have no choice but to roll to a fresh transaction to continue logging. This breaks repair's policy that repairs should commit atomically. It may break the filesystem as well, since all files involved are pinned until the delayed pptr xattr processing completes. This is a completely bad engineering choice. Note that the diroffset information is not used anywhere in the directory lookup code. Observe that the only information that we require for a parent pointer is the inverse of an pre-ftype dirent, since this is all we need to reconstruct a directory entry: (parent_ino, dirent_name) -> NULL The xattr code supports xattrs with zero-length values, surprisingly. The parent_gen field makes it easy to export parent handle information, so it can be retained: (parent_ino, parent_gen, dirent_name) -> NULL Moving the ondisk format to this format is very advantageous for repair code. Unfortunately, there is one hitch: xattr names cannot exceed 255 bytes due to ondisk format limitations. We don't want to constrain the length of dirent names, so instead we create a special VLOOKUP mode for extended attributes that allows parent pointers to require matching on both the name and the value. The ondisk format of a parent pointer can then become: (parent_ino, parent_gen, dirent_name[0:242]) -> (dirent_name[243:255]) Because we can always look up a specific parent pointer. Most of the patches in this patchset prepare the high level xattr code and the lower level logging code to do this correctly, and the last patch switches the ondisk format. If you're going to start using this mess, you probably ought to just pull from my git trees, which are linked below. This is an extraordinary way to destroy everything. Enjoy! Comments and questions are, as always, welcome. kernel git tree: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/djwong/xfs-linux.git/log/?h=pptrs-name-in-attr-key xfsprogs git tree: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/djwong/xfsprogs-dev.git/log/?h=pptrs-name-in-attr-key fstests git tree: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/djwong/xfstests-dev.git/log/?h=pptrs-name-in-attr-key --- fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_attr.c | 66 +++++--- fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_attr.h | 5 + fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_attr_leaf.c | 41 ++++- fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_da_btree.h | 6 + fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_da_format.h | 39 ++++- fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_fs.h | 2 fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_log_format.h | 31 +++- fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_parent.c | 215 +++++++++++++++++---------- fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_parent.h | 46 +++--- fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_trans_resv.c | 7 + fs/xfs/scrub/dir.c | 34 +--- fs/xfs/scrub/dir_repair.c | 87 +++-------- fs/xfs/scrub/parent.c | 48 +----- fs/xfs/scrub/parent_repair.c | 55 ++----- fs/xfs/scrub/trace.h | 65 +------- fs/xfs/xfs_attr_item.c | 318 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------- fs/xfs/xfs_attr_item.h | 3 fs/xfs/xfs_inode.c | 30 ++-- fs/xfs/xfs_ondisk.h | 1 fs/xfs/xfs_parent_utils.c | 8 + fs/xfs/xfs_symlink.c | 3 fs/xfs/xfs_xattr.c | 5 + 22 files changed, 660 insertions(+), 455 deletions(-)