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As this code is not actually used by any of the existing interfaces, it seems unlikely to break anything (famous last words). The internal kernel interface to manipulate these attributes is invoked using two new IO_ flags: IO_NORMAL and IO_EXT. These flags may be specified in the ioflags word of VOP_READ, VOP_WRITE, and VOP_TRUNCATE. Specifying IO_NORMAL means that you want to do I/O to the normal data part of the file and IO_EXT means that you want to do I/O to the extended attributes part of the file. IO_NORMAL and IO_EXT are mutually exclusive for VOP_READ and VOP_WRITE, but may be specified individually or together in the case of VOP_TRUNCATE. For example, when removing a file, VOP_TRUNCATE is called with both IO_NORMAL and IO_EXT set. For backward compatibility, if neither IO_NORMAL nor IO_EXT is set, then IO_NORMAL is assumed. Note that the BA_ and IO_ flags have been `merged' so that they may both be used in the same flags word. This merger is possible by assigning the IO_ flags to the low sixteen bits and the BA_ flags the high sixteen bits. This works because the high sixteen bits of the IO_ word is reserved for read-ahead and help with write clustering so will never be used for flags. This merge lets us get away from code of the form: if (ioflags & IO_SYNC) flags |= BA_SYNC; For the future, I have considered adding a new field to the vattr structure, va_extsize. This addition could then be exported through the stat structure to allow applications to find out the size of the extended attribute storage and also would provide a more standard interface for truncating them (via VOP_SETATTR rather than VOP_TRUNCATE). I am also contemplating adding a pathconf parameter (for concreteness, lets call it _PC_MAX_EXTSIZE) which would let an application determine the maximum size of the extended atribute storage. Sponsored by: DARPA & NAI Labs. |
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ffs_alloc.c | ||
ffs_balloc.c | ||
ffs_extern.h | ||
ffs_inode.c | ||
ffs_snapshot.c | ||
ffs_softdep_stub.c | ||
ffs_softdep.c | ||
ffs_subr.c | ||
ffs_tables.c | ||
ffs_vfsops.c | ||
ffs_vnops.c | ||
fs.h | ||
README.snapshot | ||
README.softupdates | ||
softdep.h |
$FreeBSD$ Using Soft Updates To enable the soft updates feature in your kernel, add option SOFTUPDATES to your kernel configuration. Once you are running a kernel with soft update support, you need to enable it for whichever filesystems you wish to run with the soft update policy. This is done with the -n option to tunefs(8) on the UNMOUNTED filesystems, e.g. from single-user mode you'd do something like: tunefs -n enable /usr To permanently enable soft updates on the /usr filesystem (or at least until a corresponding ``tunefs -n disable'' is done). Soft Updates Copyright Restrictions As of June 2000 the restrictive copyright has been removed and replaced with a `Berkeley-style' copyright. The files implementing soft updates now reside in the sys/ufs/ffs directory and are compiled into the generic kernel by default. Soft Updates Status The soft updates code has been running in production on many systems for the past two years generally quite successfully. The two current sets of shortcomings are: 1) On filesystems that are chronically full, the two minute lag from the time a file is deleted until its free space shows up will result in premature filesystem full failures. This failure mode is most evident in small filesystems such as the root. For this reason, use of soft updates is not recommended on the root filesystem. 2) If your system routines runs parallel processes each of which remove many files, the kernel memory rate limiting code may not be able to slow removal operations to a level sustainable by the disk subsystem. The result is that the kernel runs out of memory and hangs. Both of these problems are being addressed, but have not yet been resolved. There are no other known problems at this time. How Soft Updates Work For more general information on soft updates, please see: http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/ http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/papers/CSE-TR-254-95/ -- Marshall Kirk McKusick <mckusick@mckusick.com> July 2000