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Commit 1a63143d authored by Hans van Kranenburg's avatar Hans van Kranenburg Committed by David Sterba
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Btrfs: btrfs_ioctl_search_key documentation



A programmer who is trying to implement calling the btrfs SEARCH
or SEARCH_V2 ioctl will probably soon end up reading this struct
definition.

Properly document the input fields to prevent common misconceptions:
 1. The search space is linear, not 3 dimensional. The invidual min/max
 values for objectid, type and offset cannot be used to filter the
 result, they only define the endpoints of an interval.
 2. The transaction id (a.k.a. generation) filter applies only on
 transaction id of the last COW operation on a whole metadata page, not
 on individual items.

Ad 1. The first misunderstanding was helped by the previous misleading
comments on min/max type and offset:
  "keys returned will be >= min and <= max".

Ad 2. For example, running btrfs balance will happily cause rewriting of
metadata pages that contain a filesystem tree of a read only subvolume,
causing transids to be increased.

Also, improve descriptions of tree_id and nr_items and add in/out
annotations.

Signed-off-by: default avatarHans van Kranenburg <hans.van.kranenburg@mendix.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
parent ef7cdac1
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