Re: [PATCH v4 00/14] forcealign for xfs

[John Garry]

On 05/09/2024 22:47, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > >   If the start or end of the extent which needs unmapping is
> > > >        unaligned then we convert that extent to unwritten and skip,
> > > >        is it? (__xfs_bunmapi())
> > > The high level code should be aligning the start and end of the
> > > file range to be removed via xfs_inode_alloc_unitsize().
> > Is that the case for something like truncate? There we just say what is the
> > end block which we want to truncate to in
> > xfs_itruncate_extents_flags(new_size)  ->
> > xfs_bunmapi_range(XFS_B_TO_FSB(new_size)), and that may not be alloc unit
> > aligned.
> Ah, I thought we had that alignment in xfs_itruncate_extents_flags()
> already, but if we don't then that's a bug that needs to be fixed.

AFAICS, forcealign behaviour is same as RT, so then this would be a 
mainline bug, right?

> > We change the space reservation in xfs-setattr_size() for this case
> (patch 9) but then don't do any alignment there - it relies on
> xfs_itruncate_extents_flags() to do the right thing w.r.t. extent
> removal alignment w.r.t. the new EOF.
>
> i.e. The xfs_setattr_size() code takes care of EOF block zeroing and
> page cache removal so the user doesn't see old data beyond EOF,
> whilst xfs_itruncate_extents_flags() is supposed to take care of the
> extent removal and the details of that operation (e.g. alignment).

So we should roundup the unmap block to the alloc unit, correct? I have 
my doubts about that, and thought that xfs_bunmapi_range() takes care of 
any alignment handling.

> Patch 10 also modifies xfs_can_free_eofblocks() to take alignment
> into account for the post-eof block removal, but doesn't change
> xfs_free_eofblocks() at all. i.e  it also relies on
> xfs_itruncate_extents_flags() to do the right thing for force
> aligned inodes.

What state should the blocks post-EOF blocks be? A simple example of 
partially truncating an alloc unit is:

$xfs_io -c "extsize" mnt/file
[16384] mnt/file


$xfs_bmap -vvp mnt/file
mnt/file:
 EXT: FILE-OFFSET      BLOCK-RANGE      AG AG-OFFSET        TOTAL FLAGS
   0: [0..20479]:      192..20671        0 (192..20671)     20480 000000


$truncate -s 10461184 mnt/file # 10M - 6FSB

$xfs_bmap -vvp mnt/file
mnt/file:
 EXT: FILE-OFFSET      BLOCK-RANGE      AG AG-OFFSET        TOTAL FLAGS
   0: [0..20431]:      192..20623        0 (192..20623)     20432 000000
   1: [20432..20447]:  20624..20639      0 (20624..20639)      16 010000
 FLAG Values:
    0010000 Unwritten preallocated extent

Is that incorrect state?

> In this case, we are removing post-eof speculative preallocation
> that that has been allocated by delalloc conversion during
> writeback.  These post-eof extents will already be unwritten extents
> because delalloc conversion uses unwritten extents to avoid
> stale data exposure if we crash between allocation and the data
> being written to the extents. Hence there should be no extents to
> convert to unwritten in the majority of cases here.
>
> The only case where we might get written extents beyond EOF is if
> the file has been truncated down, but in that case we don't really
> care because truncate should have already taken care of post-eof
> extent alignment for us. xfs_can_free_eofblocks() will see this
> extent alignment and so we'll skip xfs_free_eofblocks() in this case
> altogether....
>
> Hence xfs_free_eofblocks() should never need to convert a partial
> unaligned extent range to unwritten when force-align is enabled
> because the post-eof extents should already be unwritten. We also
> want to leave the inode in the most optimal state for future
> extension, which means we want the post-eof extent to be correctly
> aligned.
>
> Hence there are multiple reasons that xfs_itruncate_extents_flags()
> should be aligning the post-EOF block it is starting the unmapping
> at for force aligned allocation contexts. And in doing so, we remove
> the weird corner case where we can have an unaligned extent state
> boundary at EOF for atomic writes....

Yeah, I don't think that sub-alloc unit extent zeroing would help us 
there, as we not be dealing with a new extent (for zeroing to occur).

Thanks,
John