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由 Dave Chinner 提交于
Whiteouts are used by overlayfs - it has a crazy convention that a whiteout is a character device inode with a major:minor of 0:0. Because it's not documented anywhere, here's an example of what RENAME_WHITEOUT does on ext4: # echo foo > /mnt/scratch/foo # echo bar > /mnt/scratch/bar # ls -l /mnt/scratch total 24 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4 Feb 11 20:22 bar -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4 Feb 11 20:22 foo drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Feb 11 20:18 lost+found # src/renameat2 -w /mnt/scratch/foo /mnt/scratch/bar # ls -l /mnt/scratch total 20 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4 Feb 11 20:22 bar c--------- 1 root root 0, 0 Feb 11 20:23 foo drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Feb 11 20:18 lost+found # cat /mnt/scratch/bar foo # In XFS rename terms, the operation that has been done is that source (foo) has been moved to the target (bar), which is like a nomal rename operation, but rather than the source being removed, it have been replaced with a whiteout. We can't allocate whiteout inodes within the rename transaction due to allocation being a multi-commit transaction: rename needs to be a single, atomic commit. Hence we have several options here, form most efficient to least efficient: - use DT_WHT in the target dirent and do no whiteout inode allocation. The main issue with this approach is that we need hooks in lookup to create a virtual chardev inode to present to userspace and in places where we might need to modify the dirent e.g. unlink. Overlayfs also needs to be taught about DT_WHT. Most invasive change, lowest overhead. - create a special whiteout inode in the root directory (e.g. a ".wino" dirent) and then hardlink every new whiteout to it. This means we only need to create a single whiteout inode, and rename simply creates a hardlink to it. We can use DT_WHT for these, though using DT_CHR means we won't have to modify overlayfs, nor anything in userspace. Downside is we have to look up the whiteout inode on every operation and create it if it doesn't exist. - copy ext4: create a special whiteout chardev inode for every whiteout. This is more complex than the above options because of the lack of atomicity between inode creation and the rename operation, requiring us to create a tmpfile inode and then linking it into the directory structure during the rename. At least with a tmpfile inode crashes between the create and rename doesn't leave unreferenced inodes or directory pollution around. By far the simplest thing to do in the short term is to copy ext4. While it is the most inefficient way of supporting whiteouts, but as an initial implementation we can simply reuse existing functions and add a small amount of extra code the the rename operation. When we get full whiteout support in the VFS (via the dentry cache) we can then look to supporting DT_WHT method outlined as the first method of supporting whiteouts. But until then, we'll stick with what overlayfs expects us to be: dumb and stupid. Signed-off-by: NDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
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