The new prefered inteface for evicting an inode from the inode cache
is the ->evict_inode() callback. It replaces both the ->delete_inode()
and ->clear_inode() callbacks which were previously used for this.
The fsync() callback in the file_operations structure used to take
3 arguments. The callback now only takes 2 arguments because the
dentry argument was determined to be unused by all consumers. To
handle this a compatibility prototype was added to ensure the right
prototype is used. Our implementation never used the dentry argument
either so it's just a matter of using the right prototype.
The const keyword was added to the 'struct xattr_handler' in the
generic Linux super_block structure. To handle this we define an
appropriate xattr_handler_t typedef which can be used. This was
the preferred solution because it keeps the code clean and readable.
The Linux specific file operations have all been located in the
file zpl_file.c. These functions primarily rely on the reworked
zfs_* functions to do their job. They are also responsible for
converting the possible Solaris style error codes to negative
Linux errors.
This first zpl_* commit also includes a common zpl.h header with
minimal entries to register the Linux specific hooks. In also
adds all the new zpl_* file to the Makefile.in. This is not a
standalone commit, you required the following zpl_* commits.
This code is used for snapshot and heavily leverages Solaris
functionality we do not want to reimplement. These files have
been removed, including references to them, and will be replaced
by a zfs_snap.c/zpl_snap.c implementation which handles snapshots.
This code originates in OpenSolaris and was modified by KQ Infotech
to be compatible with Linux. While supporting uios in the short
term is useful to get something working this is not an abstraction
we want to keep. This code is expected to be short lived and
removed as soon as all the remaining uio based APIs and updated.
ZFS even under Solaris does not strictly require libshare to be
available. The current implementation attempts to dlopen() the
library to access the needed symbols. If this fails libshare
support is simply disabled.
This means that on Linux we only need the most minimal libshare
implementation. In fact just enough to prevent the build from
failing. Longer term we can decide if we want to implement a
libshare library like Solaris. At best this would be an abstraction
layer between ZFS and NFS/SMB. Alternately, we can drop libshare
entirely and directly integrate ZFS with Linux's NFS/SMB.
Finally the bare bones user-libshare.m4 test was dropped. If we
do decide to implement libshare at some point it will surely be
as part of this package so the check is not needed.
If libselinux is detected on your system at configure time link
against it. This allows us to use a library call to detect if
selinux is enabled and if it is to pass the mount option:
"context=\"system_u:object_r:file_t:s0"
For now this is required because none of the existing selinux
policies are aware of the zfs filesystem type. Because of this
they do not properly enable xattr based labeling even though
zfs supports all of the required hooks.
Until distro's add zfs as a known xattr friendly fs type we
must use mntpoint labeling. Alternately, end users could modify
their existing selinux policy with a little guidance.
ZFS works best when it is notified as soon as possible when a device
failure occurs. This allows it to immediately start any recovery
actions which may be needed. In theory Linux supports a flag which
can be set on bio's called FAILFAST which provides this quick
notification by disabling the retry logic in the lower scsi layers.
That's the theory at least. In practice is turns out that while the
flag exists you oddly have to set it with the BIO_RW_AHEAD flag.
And even when it's set it you may get retries in the low level
drivers decides that's the right behavior, or if you don't get the
right error codes reported to the scsi midlayer.
Unfortunately, without additional kernels patchs there's not much
which can be done to improve this. Basically, this just means that
it may take 2-3 minutes before a ZFS is notified properly that a
device has failed. This can be improved and I suspect I'll be
submitting patches upstream to handle this.
One of the neat tricks an autoconf style project is capable of
is allow configurion/building in a directory other than the
source directory. The major advantage to this is that you can
build the project various different ways while making changes
in a single source tree.
For example, this project is designed to work on various different
Linux distributions each of which work slightly differently. This
means that changes need to verified on each of those supported
distributions perferably before the change is committed to the
public git repo.
Using nfs and custom build directories makes this much easier.
I now have a single source tree in nfs mounted on several different
systems each running a supported distribution. When I make a
change to the source base I suspect may break things I can
concurrently build from the same source on all the systems each
in their own subdirectory.
wget -c http://github.com/downloads/behlendorf/zfs/zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
tar -xzf zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
cd zfs-x-y-z
------------------------- run concurrently ----------------------
<ubuntu system> <fedora system> <debian system> <rhel6 system>
mkdir ubuntu mkdir fedora mkdir debian mkdir rhel6
cd ubuntu cd fedora cd debian cd rhel6
../configure ../configure ../configure ../configure
make make make make
make check make check make check make check
This change also moves many of the include headers from individual
incude/sys directories under the modules directory in to a single
top level include directory. This has the advantage of making
the build rules cleaner and logically it makes a bit more sense.
Brian Behlendorf