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Commit 66ae56a5 authored by Christoph Hellwig's avatar Christoph Hellwig Committed by Darrick J. Wong
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xfs: introduce an always_cow mode



Add a mode where XFS never overwrites existing blocks in place.  This
is to aid debugging our COW code, and also put infatructure in place
for things like possible future support for zoned block devices, which
can't support overwrites.

This mode is enabled globally by doing a:

    echo 1 > /sys/fs/xfs/debug/always_cow

Note that the parameter is global to allow running all tests in xfstests
easily in this mode, which would not easily be possible with a per-fs
sysfs file.

In always_cow mode persistent preallocations are disabled, and fallocate
will fail when called with a 0 mode (with our without
FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE), and not create unwritten extent for zeroed space
when called with FALLOC_FL_ZERO_RANGE or FALLOC_FL_UNSHARE_RANGE.

There are a few interesting xfstests failures when run in always_cow
mode:

 - generic/392 fails because the bytes used in the file used to test
   hole punch recovery are less after the log replay.  This is
   because the blocks written and then punched out are only freed
   with a delay due to the logging mechanism.
 - xfs/170 will fail as the already fragile file streams mechanism
   doesn't seem to interact well with the COW allocator
 - xfs/180 xfs/182 xfs/192 xfs/198 xfs/204 and xfs/208 will claim
   the file system is badly fragmented, but there is not much we
   can do to avoid that when always writing out of place
 - xfs/205 fails because overwriting a file in always_cow mode
   will require new space allocation and the assumption in the
   test thus don't work anymore.
 - xfs/326 fails to modify the file at all in always_cow mode after
   injecting the refcount error, leading to an unexpected md5sum
   after the remount, but that again is expected

Signed-off-by: default avatarChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: default avatarDarrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDarrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
parent c4feb0b1
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