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Commit 3985b70a authored by Amir Goldstein's avatar Amir Goldstein Committed by Miklos Szeredi
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ovl: decode connected upper dir file handles



Until this change, we decoded upper file handles by instantiating an
overlay dentry from the real upper dentry. This is sufficient to handle
pure upper files, but insufficient to handle merge/impure dirs.

To that end, if decoded real upper dir is connected and hashed, we
lookup an overlay dentry with the same path as the real upper dir.
If decoded real upper is non-dir, we instantiate a disconnected overlay
dentry as before this change.

Because ovl_fh_to_dentry() returns a connected overlay dir dentry,
exportfs never needs to call get_parent() and get_name() to reconnect an
upper overlay dir. Because connectable non-dir file handles are not
supported, exportfs will not be able to use fh_to_parent() and get_name()
methods to reconnect a disconnected non-dir to its parent. Therefore, the
methods get_parent() and get_name() are implemented just to print out a
sanity warning and the method fh_to_parent() is implemented to warn the
user that using the 'subtree_check' exportfs option is not supported.

An alternative approach could have been to implement instantiating of
an overlay directory inode from origin/index and implement get_parent()
and get_name() by calling into underlying fs operations and them
instantiating the overlay parent dir.

The reasons for not choosing the get_parent() approach were:
- Obtaining a disconnected overlay dir dentry would requires a
  delicate re-factoring of ovl_lookup() to get a dentry with overlay
  parent info. It was preferred to avoid doing that re-factoring unless
  it was proven worthy.
- Going down the path of disconnected dir would mean that the (non
  trivial) code path of d_splice_alias() could be traveled and that
  meant writing more tests and introduces race cases that are very hard
  to hit on purpose. Taking the path of connecting overlay dentry by
  forward lookup is therefore the safe and boring way to avoid surprises.

The culprits of the chosen "connected overlay dentry" approach:
- We need to take special care to rename of ancestors while connecting
  the overlay dentry by real dentry path. These subtleties are usually
  handled by generic exportfs and VFS code.
- In a hypothetical workload, we could end up in a loop trying to connect,
  interrupted by rename and restarting connect forever.

Signed-off-by: default avatarAmir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarMiklos Szeredi <mszeredi@redhat.com>
parent 8556a420
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