linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v6 2/2] fuse: add new function to invalidate cache for all inodes

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Message-ID: <CAJfpegsThcFwhKb9XA3WWBXY_m=_0pRF+FZF+vxAxe3RbZ_c3A@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2025 15:26:24 +0100
From: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@...redi.hu>
To: Luis Henriques <luis@...lia.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>, Bernd Schubert <bschubert@....com>, 
	Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>, Christian Brauner <brauner@...nel.org>, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, 
	Matt Harvey <mharvey@...ptrading.com>, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, 
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Valentin Volkl <valentin.volkl@...n.ch>, 
	Laura Promberger <laura.promberger@...n.ch>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v6 2/2] fuse: add new function to invalidate cache for all inodes

On Tue, 18 Feb 2025 at 12:51, Luis Henriques <luis@...lia.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 18 2025, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 18 Feb 2025 at 11:04, Luis Henriques <luis@...lia.com> wrote:
> >
> >> The problem I'm trying to solve is that, if a filesystem wants to ask the
> >> kernel to get rid of all inodes, it has to request the kernel to forget
> >> each one, individually.  The specific filesystem I'm looking at is CVMFS,
> >> which is a read-only filesystem that needs to be able to update the full
> >> set of filesystem objects when a new generation snapshot becomes
> >> available.
> >
> > Yeah, we talked about this use case.  As I remember there was a
> > proposal to set an epoch, marking all objects for "revalidate needed",
> > which I think is a better solution to the CVMFS problem, than just
> > getting rid of unused objects.
>
> OK, so I think I'm missing some context here.  And, obviously, I also miss
> some more knowledge on the filesystem itself.  But, if I understand it
> correctly, the concept of 'inode' in CVMFS is very loose: when a new
> snapshot generation is available (you mentioned 'epoch', which is, I
> guess, the same thing) the inodes are all renewed -- the inode numbers
> aren't kept between generations/epochs.
>
> Do you have any links for such discussions, or any details on how this
> proposal is being implemented?  This would probably be done mostly in
> user-space I guess, but it would still need a way to get rid of the unused
> inodes from old snapshots, right?  (inodes from old snapshots still in use
> would obvious be kept aroud).

I don't have links.  Adding Valentin Volkl and Laura Promberger to the
Cc list, maybe they can help with clarification.

As far as I understand it would work by incrementing fc->epoch on
FUSE_INVALIDATE_ALL. When an object is looked up/created the current
epoch is copied to e.g. dentry->d_time.  fuse_dentry_revalidate() then
compares d_time with fc->epoch and forces an invalidate on mismatch.

Only problem with this is that it seems very CVMFS specific, but I
guess so is your proposal.

Implementing the LRU purge is more generally useful, but I'm not sure
if that helps CVMFS, since it would only get rid of unused objects.

Thanks,
Miklos