Re: [RFC PATCH 0/7] Inotify support in FUSE and virtiofs

[Amir Goldstein]

> > > > Hi Jan,
> > > >
> > > > Agreed. That's what Ioannis is trying to say. That some of the remote events
> > > > can be lost if fuse/guest local inode is unlinked. I think problem exists
> > > > both for shared and non-shared directory case.
> > > >
> > > > With local filesystems we have a control that we can first queue up
> > > > the event in buffer before we remove local watches. With events travelling
> > > > from a remote server, there is no such control/synchronization. It can
> > > > very well happen that events got delayed in the communication path
> > > > somewhere and local watches went away and now there is no way to
> > > > deliver those events to the application.
> > >
> > > So after thinking for some time about this I have the following question
> > > about the architecture of this solution: Why do you actually have local
> > > fsnotify watches at all? They seem to cause quite some trouble... I mean
> > > cannot we have fsnotify marks only on FUSE server and generate all events
> > > there? When e.g. file is created from the client, client tells the server
> > > about creation, the server performs the creation which generates the
> > > fsnotify event, that is received by the server and forwared back to the
> > > client which just queues it into notification group's queue for userspace
> > > to read it.
> > >
> > > Now with this architecture there's no problem with duplicate events for
> > > local & server notification marks, similarly there's no problem with lost
> > > events after inode deletion because events received by the client are
> > > directly queued into notification queue without any checking whether inode
> > > is still alive etc. Would this work or am I missing something?
> > >
> >
> > What about group #1 that wants mask A and group #2 that wants mask B
> > events?
> >
> > Do you propose to maintain separate event queues over the protocol?
> > Attach a "recipient list" to each event?
>
> Yes, that was my idea. Essentially when we see group A creates mark on FUSE
> for path P, we notify server, it will create notification group A on the
> server (if not already existing - there we need some notification group
> identifier unique among all clients), and place mark for it on path P. Then
> the full stream of notification events generated for group A on the server
> will just be forwarded to the client and inserted into the A's notification
> queue. IMO this is very simple solution to implement - you just need to
> forward mark addition / removal events from the client to the server and you
> forward event stream from the server to the client. Everything else is
> handled by the fsnotify infrastructure on the server.
>
> > I just don't see how this can scale other than:
> > - Local marks and connectors manage the subscriptions on local machine
> > - Protocol updates the server with the combined masks for watched objects
>
> I agree that depending on the usecase and particular FUSE filesystem
> performance of this solution may be a concern. OTOH the only additional
> cost of this solution I can see (compared to all those processes just
> watching files locally) is the passing of the events from the server to the
> client. For local FUSE filesystems such as virtiofs this should be rather
> cheap since you have to do very little processing for each generated event.
> For filesystems such as sshfs, I can imagine this would be a bigger deal.
>
> Also one problem I can see with my proposal is that it will have problems
> with stuff such as leases - i.e., if the client does not notify the server
> of the changes quickly but rather batches local operations and tells the
> server about them only on special occasions. I don't know enough about FUSE
> filesystems to tell whether this is a frequent problem or not.
>
> > I think that the "post-mortem events" issue could be solved by keeping an
> > S_DEAD fuse inode object in limbo just for the mark.
> > When a remote server sends FS_IN_IGNORED or FS_DELETE_SELF for
> > an inode, the fuse client inode can be finally evicted.
> > I haven't tried to see how hard that would be to implement.
>
> Sure, there can be other solutions to this particular problem. I just
> want to discuss the other architecture to see why we cannot to it in a
> simple way :).
>

Fair enough.

Beyond the scalability aspects, I think that a design that exposes the group
to the remote server and allows to "inject" events to the group queue
will prevent
users from useful features going forward.

For example, fanotify ignored_mask could be added to a group, even on
a mount mark, even if the remote server only supports inode marks and it
would just work.

Another point of view for the post-mortem events:
As Miklos once noted and as you wrote above, for cache coherency and leases,
an async notification queue is not adequate and synchronous notifications are
too costly, so there needs to be some shared memory solution involving guest
cache invalidation by host.

Suppose said cache invalidation solution would be able to set a variety of
"dirty" flags, not just one type of dirty or to call in another way -
an "event mask".
If that is available, then when a fuse inode gets evicted, the events from the
"event mask" can be queued before destroying the inode and mark -
post mortem event issue averted...

Thanks,
Amir.