Re: [RFC] ext3 freeze feature

From: Takashi Sato
Date: Fri Feb 15 2008 - 06:52:19 EST


Hi,

Christoph Hellwig wrote:
On Fri, Feb 08, 2008 at 08:26:57AM -0500, Andreas Dilger wrote:
You may as well make the common ioctl the same as the XFS version,
both by number and parameters, so that applications which already
understand the XFS ioctl will work on other filesystems.

Yes. In facy you should be able to lift the implementations of
XFS_IOC_FREEZE and XFS_IOC_THAW to generic code, there's nothing
XFS-specific in there.

According to Documentation/ioctl-number.txt,
XFS_IOC_XXXs (_IOWR('X', aa, bb)) are defined for XFS like below.
From Documentation/ioctl-number.txt:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code Seq# Include File Comments
========================================================
: :
'X' all linux/xfs_fs.h
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
So XFS_IOC_FREEZE and XFS_IOC_THAW cannot be lifted to generic code simply.
I think we should create new generic numbers for freeze and thaw
like FIBMAP as followings.
linux/fs.h:
#define FIFREEZE _IO(0x00,3)
#define FITHAW _IO(0x00,4)

And xfs_freeze calls XFS_IOC_FREEZE with a magic number 1, but what is 1?
Instead, I'd like the sec to timeout on freeze API in order to thaw
the filesystem automatically. It can prevent a filesystem from staying
frozen forever.
(Because a freezer may cause a deadlock by accessing the frozen filesystem.)

Any comments are very welcome.

Cheers, Takashi

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