[Ocfs2-devel] [patch 09/15] ocfs2: add functions to add and remove inode in orphan dir

[Mark Fasheh]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 11:37:56AM +0800, Joseph Qi wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> I much appreciate your pertinent comments on this feature.
> 
> The reason we use orphan dir is to make sure allocating blocks and
> updating inode size consistent, and this will result an entry in orphan
> is not truly deleted one.

Right, I got that from the patch. Good idea by the way.


> To distinguish dio from unlink, we introduce a new dinode flag
> OCFS2_DIO_ORPHANED_FL.

Ok, that's also good.


> So after this change, once unlink and dio happen concurrently, there
> may be two kinds of results:
> 1. On the same node, only one entry will be added with flag
> OCFS2_ORPHANED_FL, and flag OCFS2_DIO_ORPHANED_FL will be set and clear
> during dio.
> 2. On different nodes, two entries will be added with each flag
> OCFS2_ORPHANED_FL or OCFS2_DIO_ORPHANED_FL.
> 
> Since entry name is stringified from blkno and the length is fixed
> OCFS2_ORPHAN_NAMELEN, so adding a prefix as you suggested may affect
> too much.

No, adding the prefix is much more preferable to intentionally corrupting
the conents of a directory. That OCFS2_ORPHAN_NAMELEN is a #define does not
matter, you are free to make it whatever reasonable value fits the name. The
directory code naturally handles this, whtether the length is
OCFS2_ORPHAN_NAMELEN or OCFS2_ORPHAN_NAMELEN + PREFIX_NAMELEN.

Also if you were to run fsck against the file system it will (should) complain
about having duplciate entries in the orphan dir.

Aside from the corruption issue, there are usability issues too. Someone
running "ls //orphan_dir:0000" will not be able to tell whether a name is
there for dio or nlink==0. If you prefix it, then debugging becomes much
easier.


Btw, did you see my note about a readonly superblock flag for this? We're
going to need to handle backward compatibility too.
	--Mark

--
Mark Fasheh