hi
i think i didn't explain well what i'm gonna do, and this cause some
misunderstanding.
first i'm not trying to comprimise UNIX security for some performance gain.
i'm not trying to say that DOS or any other funny system, was doing right by
not implementing any security model.
what i'm trying to do is as follows:
we are writing a filesystem layer to allow more than one machine write to
the same disk.
we could have implement a brand new FS for this reason like the GFS folks
are doing, but we are not ready for such a big project. so we are trying to
hack into existing FS and manipuilate them to support this feature.
since you can't just let one machine write into another machine disk, we are
implemneting some kind of agents which comunicate over network, and let the
local agent allocate the blocks needed for the file so the remote machine
can write safly to the disk, knowing that no other process will ever get
this blocks.
so it is done like this- local agaent alloacte, and remote machine writes
directly to the disk controler.
now no system call can allocate blocks in unix because of all the security
issue you all brought, so i'm hacking into ext2fs to allocate the blocks for
me. the problem is that when allocating a block it is filled with zeros and
the block is marked DIRTY -> so it will endup being written to the disk.
this is problem in my case for 3 reasons:
1) it will write to the DISK meaningless data, which means that the copying
process will take double as much time
2) since we are working with huge files( GBs ) it will wipe out all other
processes buffer cache resulting with an overall slowdown for the system
3) and most importent, it might over write blocks which were written to the
disk directly by the remote machine
so what i'm trying to do is eliminate all those problems by "cheating" VFS
to think that the blocks were writen to the disk already( marking the
buffer_head as clean and releasing it ).
i will keep the file size at zero so process can read from it, and from time
to time update the size when i get notificied by the remote machine.
the file must be kept in a read-only state until it was all written, so not
to colide with local processes.
so again, no user process can ever get to read those blocks until the remote
machine over write them with new data.
i hope this clear things,
/gaby
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 15 2000 - 21:00:14 EST