Date:	Thu, 20 Mar 2014 17:40:06 +0100 (CET)
From:	Lukáš Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com>
To:	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
cc:	"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>
Subject: Proposal draft for data checksumming for ext4

Hi all,

I've started thinking about implementing data checksumming for ext4 file
system. This is not meant to be a formal proposal or a definitive design
description since I am not that far yet, but just a few ideas to start
the discussion and trying to figure out what the best design for data
checksumming in ext4 might be.



			   Data checksumming for ext4
				  Version 0.1
				 March 20, 2014


Goal
====

The goal is to implement data checksumming for ext4 file system in order
to improve data integrity and increase protection against silent data
corruption while maintaining reasonable performance and usability of the
file system.

While data checksums can be certainly used in different ways, for example
data deduplication this proposal is very much focused on data integrity.


Checksum function
=================

By default I plan to use crc32c checksum, but I do not see a reason why not
not to be able to support different checksum function. Also by default the
checksum size should be 32 bits, but the plan is to make the format
flexible enough to be able to support different checksum sizes.


Checksumming and Validating
===========================

On write checksums on the data blocks need to be computed right before its
bio is submitted and written out as metadata to its position (see bellow)
after the bio completes (similarly as we do unwritten extent conversion
today).

Similarly on read checksums needs to be computed after the bio completes
and compared with the stored values to verify that the data is intact.

All of this should be done using workqueues (Concurrency Managed
Workqueues) so we do not block the other operations and to spread the
checksum computation and comparison across CPUs. One wq for reads and one
for writes. Specific setup of the wq such as priority, or concurrency limits
should be decided later based on the performance evaluation.

While we already have ext4 infrastructure to submit bios in
fs/ext4/page-io.c where the entry point is ext4_bio_write_page() we would
need the same for reads to be able to provide ext4 specific hooks for
io completion.


Where to store the checksums
============================

While the problems above are pretty straightforward when it comes to the
design, actually storing and retrieving the data checksums from to/from
the ext4 format requires much more thought to be efficient enough and play
nicely with the overall ext4 design while trying not to be too intrusive.

I came up with several ideas about where to store and how to access data
checksums. While some of the ideas might not be the most viable options,
it's still interesting to think about the advantages and disadvantages of
each particular solution.

a) Static layout
----------------

This scheme fits perfectly into the ext4 design. Checksum blocks
would be preallocated the same way as we do with inode tables for example.
Each block group should have it's own contiguous region of checksum blocks
to be able to store checksums for bocks from entire block group it belongs
to. Each checksum block would contain header including checksum of the
checksum block.

We still have unused 4 Bytes in the ext4_group_desc structure, so storing
a block number for the checksum table should not be a problem.

Finding a checksum location of each block in the block group should be done
in O(1) time, which is very good. Other advantage is a locality with the
data blocks in question since both resides in the same block group.

Big disadvantage is the fact that this solution is not very flexibile which
comes from the fact that the location of "checksum table" is statically
located at a precise position in the file system at mkfs time.

There are also other problems we should be concerned with. Ext4 file system
does have support for metadata checksumming so all the metadata does have
its own checksum. While we can avoid unnecessarily checksuming inodes, group
descriptors and basicall all statically positioned metadata, we still have
dynamically allocated metadata blocks such as extent blocks. These block
do not have to be checksummed but we would still have space reserved in the
checksum table.

I think that we should be able to make this feature without introducing any
incompatibility, but it would make more sense to make it RO compatible only
so we can preserve the checksums. But that's up to the implementation.

b) Special inode
----------------

This is very "lazy" solution and should not be difficult to implement. The
idea is to have a special inode which would store the checksum blocks in
it's own data blocks.

The big disadvantage is that we would have to walk the extent tree twice for
each read, or write. There is not much to say about this solution other than
again we can make this feature without introducing any incompatibility, but
it would probably make more sense to make it RO compatible to preserve the
checksums.

c) Per inode checksum b-tree
----------------------------

See d)

d) Per block group checksum b-tree
----------------------------------

Those two schemes are very similar in that both would store checksum in a
b-tree with a block number (we could use logical block number in per inode
tree) as a key. Obviously finding a checksum would be in logarithmic time,
while the size of the tree would be possibly much bigger in the per-inode
case. In per block group case we will have much smaller boundary of
number of checksum blocks stored.

This and the fact that we would have to have at least one checksum block
per inode (which would be wasteful in the case of small files) is making per
block group solution much more viable. However the major disadvantage of
per block group solution is that the checksum tree would create a source of
contention when reading/writing from/to a different inodes in the same block
group. This might be mitigated by having a worker thread per a range of block
groups - but it might still be a bottleneck.

Again we still have 4 Bytes in ext4_group_desc to store the pointer to the
root of the tree. While the ext4_inode structure have 4Bytes of
i_obso_faddr but that's not enough. So we would have to figure out where to
store it - we could possibly abuse i_block to store it along with the extent
nodes.

File system scrub
=================

While this is certainly a feature which we want to have in both userspace
e2fsprogs and kernel I do not have any design notes at this stage.




I am sure that there are other possibilities and variants of those design
ideas, but I think that this should be enough to have a discussion started.
As I is not I think that the most viable option is d) that is, per block
group checksum tree, which gives us enough flexibility while not being too
complex solution.

I'll try to update this description as it will be getting more concrete
structure and I hope that we will have some productive discussion about
this at LSF.

Thanks!
-Lukas
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