Date:   Fri, 27 Oct 2023 06:35:58 -0400
From:   Jeff Layton <jlayton@...nel.org>
To:     Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
Cc:     Amir Goldstein <amir73il@...il.com>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@...ux.dev>,
        Christian Brauner <brauner@...nel.org>,
        Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        John Stultz <jstultz@...gle.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Stephen Boyd <sboyd@...nel.org>,
        Chandan Babu R <chandan.babu@...cle.com>,
        "Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@...nel.org>,
        Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>,
        Andreas Dilger <adilger.kernel@...ger.ca>,
        Chris Mason <clm@...com>, Josef Bacik <josef@...icpanda.com>,
        David Sterba <dsterba@...e.com>,
        Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Jan Kara <jack@...e.de>, David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>,
        linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-xfs@...r.kernel.org, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-btrfs@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-nfs@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 2/9] timekeeping: new interfaces for multigrain
 timestamp handing

On Thu, 2023-10-26 at 13:20 +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 08:25:35AM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > On Wed, 2023-10-25 at 19:05 +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 02:40:06PM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 2023-10-24 at 10:08 +0300, Amir Goldstein wrote:
> > > > > On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 6:40 AM Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com> wrote:
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > On Mon, Oct 23, 2023 at 02:18:12PM -1000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > > > > > On Mon, 23 Oct 2023 at 13:26, Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com> wrote:
> > > > > Does xfs_repair guarantee that changes of atime, or any inode changes
> > > > > for that matter, update i_version? No, it does not.
> > > > > So IMO, "atime does not update i_version" is not an "on-disk format change",
> > > > > it is a runtime behavior change, just like lazytime is.
> > > > 
> > > > This would certainly be my preference. I don't want to break any
> > > > existing users though.
> > > 
> > > That's why I'm trying to get some kind of consensus on what
> > > rules and/or atime configurations people are happy for me to break
> > > to make it look to users like there's a viable working change
> > > attribute being supplied by XFS without needing to change the on
> > > disk format.
> > > 
> > 
> > I agree that the only bone of contention is whether to count atime
> > updates against the change attribute. I think we have consensus that all
> > in-kernel users do _not_ want atime updates counted against the change
> > attribute. The only real question is these "legacy" users of
> > di_changecount.
> 
> Please stop refering to "legacy users" of di_changecount. Whether
> there are users or not is irrelevant - it is defined by the current
> on-disk format specification, and as such there may be applications
> we do not know about making use of the current behaviour.
> 
> It's like a linux syscall - we can't remove them because there may
> be some user we don't know about still using that old syscall. We
> simply don't make changes that can potentially break user
> applications like that.
> 
> The on disk format is the same - there is software out that we don't
> know about that expects a certain behaviour based on the
> specification. We don't break the on disk format by making silent
> behavioural changes - we require a feature flag to indicate
> behaviour has changed so that applications can take appropriate
> actions with stuff they don't understand.
> 
> The example for this is the BIGTIME timestamp format change. The on
> disk inode structure is physically unchanged, but the contents of
> the timestamp fields are encoded very differently. Sure, the older
> kernels can read the timestamp data without any sort of problem
> occurring, except for the fact the timestamps now appear to be
> completely corrupted.
> 
> Changing the meaning of ithe contents of di_changecount is no
> different. It might look OK and nothing crashes, but nothing can be
> inferred from the value in the field because we don't know how it
> has been modified.
> 
> Hence we can't just change the meaning, encoding or behaviour of an
> on disk field that would result in existing kernels and applications
> doing the wrong thing with that field (either read or write) without
> adding a feature flag to indicate what behaviour that field should
> have.
> 
> > > > Perhaps this ought to be a mkfs option? Existing XFS filesystems could
> > > > still behave with the legacy behavior, but we could make mkfs.xfs build
> > > > filesystems by default that work like NFS requires.
> > > 
> > > If we require mkfs to set a flag to change behaviour, then we're
> > > talking about making an explicit on-disk format change to select the
> > > optional behaviour. That's precisely what I want to avoid.
> > > 
> > 
> > Right. The on-disk di_changecount would have a (subtly) different
> > meaning at that point.
> > 
> > It's not a change that requires drastic retooling though. If we were to
> > do this, we wouldn't need to grow the on-disk inode. Booting to an older
> > kernel would cause the behavior to revert. That's sub-optimal, but not
> > fatal.
> 
> See above: redefining the contents, behaviour or encoding of an on
> disk field is a change of the on-disk format specification.
> 
> The rules for on disk format changes that we work to were set in
> place long before I started working on XFS.  They are sane, well
> thought out rules that have stood the test of time and massive new
> feature introductions (CRCs, reflink, rmap, etc). And they only work
> because we don't allow anyone to bend them for convenience, short
> cuts or expediting their pet project.
> 
> > What I don't quite understand is how these tools are accessing
> > di_changecount?
> 
> As I keep saying: this is largely irrelevant to the problem at hand.
> 
> > XFS only accesses the di_changecount to propagate the value to and from
> > the i_version,
> 
> Yes.  XFS has a strong separation between on-disk structures and
> in-memory values, and i_version is simply the in-memory field we use
> to store the current di_changecount value.  We force bump i_version
> every time we modify the inode core regardless of whether anyone has
> queried i_version because that's what di_changecount requires. i.e.
> the filesystem controls the contents of i_version, not the VFS.
> 
> Now that NFS is using a proper abstraction (i.e. vfs_statx()) to get
> the change cookie, we really don't need to expose di_changecount in
> i_version at all - we could simply copy an internal di_changecount
> value into the statx cookie field in xfs_vn_getattr() and there
> would be almost no change of behaviour from the perspective of NFS
> and IMA at all.
> 
> > and there is nothing besides NFSD and IMA that queries
> > the i_version value in-kernel. So, this must be done via some sort of
> > userland tool that is directly accessing the block device (or some 3rd
> > party kernel module).
> 
> Yup, both of those sort of applications exist. e.g. the DMAPI kernel
> module allows direct access to inode metadata through a custom
> bulkstat formatter implementation - it returns different information
> comapred to the standard XFS one in the upstream kernel.
> 
> > In earlier discussions you alluded to some repair and/or analysis tools
> > that depended on this counter.
> 
> Yes, and one of those "tools" is *me*.
> 
> I frequently look at the di_changecount when doing forensic and/or
> failure analysis on filesystem corpses.  SOE analysis, relative
> modification activity, etc all give insight into what happened to
> the filesystem to get it into the state it is currently in, and
> di_changecount provides information no other metadata in the inode
> contains.
> 
> > I took a quick look in xfsprogs, but I
> > didn't see anything there. Is there a library or something that these
> > tools use to get at this value?
> 
> xfs_db is the tool I use for this, such as:
> 
> $ sudo xfs_db -c "sb 0" -c "a rootino" -c "p v3.change_count" /dev/mapper/fast
> v3.change_count = 35
> $
> 
> The root inode in this filesystem has a change count of 35. The root
> inode has 32 dirents in it, which means that no entries have ever
> been removed or renamed. This sort of insight into the past history
> of inode metadata is largely impossible to get any other way, and
> it's been the difference between understanding failure and having no
> clue more than once.
> 
> Most block device parsing applications simply write their own
> decoder that walks the on-disk format. That's pretty trivial to do,
> developers can get all the information needed to do this from the
> on-disk format specification documentation we keep on kernel.org...
> 

Fair enough. I'm not here to tell you that you guys that you need to
change how di_changecount works. If it's too valuable to keep it
counting atime-only updates, then so be it.

If that's the case however, and given that the multigrain timestamp work
is effectively dead, then I don't see an alternative to growing the on-
disk inode. Do you?
-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton@...nel.org>

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