moving affs + RDB partition support to staging? (was: Re: Moving unmaintained filesystems to staging)

[Martin Steigerwald <martin@lichtvoll.de>]

Hi Matthew.

You probably put your stick into a cave with ancient sleeping dragons :)

Added in linux-m68k mailing list, as they likely have an opinion on how 
to treat affs + RDB partition support. Also added in Jens Axboe about 
patching that RDB support broken with 2 TB or larger harddisks issue 
which had been in Linux kernel for 6 years while a patch exists that to 
my testing back then solves the issue.

Matthew Wilcox - 26.04.18, 04:57:
> On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 10:30:29PM +0200, David Sterba wrote:
> > I had similar toughts some time ago while browsing the fs/
> > directory.
> > Access to the filesystem images can be reimplemented in FUSE, but
> > other than that, I don't think the in-kernel code would be missed.
> > 
> > It's hard to know how many users are there. I was curious eg. about
> > bfs, befs, coda or feevxfs, looked at the last commits and searched
> > around web if there are any mentions or user community. But as long
> > as there's somebody listed in MAINTAINERS, the above are not
> > candidates for moving to staging or deletion.
> 
> Yeah, it's pretty sad how few commits some of these filesystems have
> had in recent years.  One can argue that they're stable and don't need
> to be fixed because they aren't broken, but I find it hard to believe
> that any of them were better-implemented than ext2 which still sees
> regular bugfixes.

Regarding affs there is a severe issue which is not in affs itself but 
in the handling of Rigid Disk Block (RDB) partitions, the Amiga 
partitioning standard, which is far more advanced than MBR: It overruns 
for 2 TB or larger drives and then wraps over to the beginning of the 
drive – I bet you can imagine what happens if you write to an area 
larger than 2 TB. I learned this with an external 2TB RDB partitioned 
harddisk back then, which I used for Sam440ep (a kind of successor for 
old, classic Amiga hardware) backup + some Linux related stuff in 
another partition.

Joanne Dow, a developer who developed hdwrench.library which HDToolBox 
uses for partitioning in AmigaOS 3.5/3.9, provided a patch back then, 
but never officially put it officially through upstreaming as I offered 
to make a good description and upstream it through Jens Axboe.

I may take this as a reason to… actually follow through this time, 
hopefully remembering all the details in order to provide a meaningful 
patch description – but I think mostly I can do just careful copy and 
paste. Even tough I believe Joanne Dow´s fix only fixed my bug report 
43511, but not 43511 which is more about a safeguarding issue in case of 
future overflows, I still think it would be good to go in in case affs + 
RDB stays in their current places.

However, in case you move affs to staging, I may be less motivated to do 
so, but then I suggest you also move RDB partitioning support to 
staging, cause this is the one that is known to be dangerously badly for 
2 TB or larger disks. And yeah, I admit I did not follow through with 
having that patch upstreamed. Probably I did not want to be responsible 
in case my description would not have been absolutely accurate or the 
patch breaks something else. I do not have that 2 TB drive anymore and 
don´t feel like setting one up in a suitable way in order to go about 
this patch, but my testing back then was quite elaborate and I still 
feel pretty confident about it.

I totally get your motivation, but I would find it somewhat sad to see 
the filesystems you mentioned go into staging. However, as I just shown 
clearly, for the user it may be better, cause there may be unfixed 
dangerous bugs. FUSE might be an interesting approach, but I bet it will 
not solve the maintenance issue. If there is no one maintaining it in 
the kernel, I think its unlikely to find someone adapting it to be a 
FUSE filesystem and maintaining it. And then I am not aware of FUSE 
based partitioning support. (And I think think ideally we´d had a 
microkernel and run all filesystems in userspace processes with a 
defined set of privileges, but that is simply not Linux as it is.)

Partitions: Amiga RDB partition on 2 TB disk way too big, while OK in 
AmigaOS 4.1
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/17/6

Bug 43521 - Amiga RDB partitions: truncates miscalculated partition size 
instead of refusing to use it
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43521

Bug 43511 - Partitions: Amiga RDB partition on 2 TB disk way too big, 
while OK in AmigaOS 4.1
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43511

I forward the relevant mail of Joanne, in

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43511#c7

I even have the patch in diff format. And I just checked, the issue is 
still unpatched as of 4.16.3.

----------  Weitergeleitete Nachricht  ----------

Betreff: Re: Partitions: Amiga RDB partition on 2 TB disk way too big, 
while OK in AmigaOS 4.1
Datum: Montag, 18. Juni 2012, 03:28:48 CEST
Von: jdow <jdow@earthlink.net>
An: Martin Steigerwald <Martin@lichtvoll.de>
Kopie: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>, linux-
kernel@vger.kernel.org, Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>, linux-
m68k@vger.kernel.org

On 2012/06/17 14:20, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 17. Juni 2012 schrieb jdow:
>> On 2012/06/17 09:36, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
>>> On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Martin Steigerwald
> <Martin@lichtvoll.de> wrote:
>>>> Am Sonntag, 17. Juni 2012 schrieb jdow:
>>>> | JXFS 64 bit file system
>>>> |
>>>> | With AmigaOS 4.x a new file system has been introduced called
>>>> | JXFS. It is a totally new 64 bit file system that supports
>>>> | partitions up to 16 TB in size. It is a modern journalling file
>>>> | system, which means that it reduces data loss if data writes to
>>>> | the disk are interrupted. It is the fastest and most reliable
>>>> | file system ever created for AmigaOS.
>>>>
>>>> http://www.amigaos.net/content/1/features
>>>>
>>>> Well I asked AmigaOS 4 developers about this issue as well. Lets 
see
>>>> what they say about 2 TB limits.
>>>
>>> 16 TB = 2 TB * 8. Perhaps they increased the block size from 512 to
>>> 4096?
>>>
>>> block/partitions/amiga.c reads the block size from
>>> RigidDiskBlock.rdb_BlockBytes,
>>> but after conversion to 512-byte blocks, all further calculations 
are
>>> done on "int", so it will overflow for disks larger than 2 TiB.
>>>
>>> Note that in your profile-binary.img, the field is 0x200, i.e. 512
>>> bytes per block,
>>> so I'll have to get a deeper look into your RDB first...
> […]
>> Note that the work I did on the Linux RDB code eons ago took full
>> cognizance of the physical and virtual block sizes.
> […]
>> I've asked Martin for a digital copy of his RDBs and what he thinks 
the
>> partition(s) should look like. I should also be told whether the disk
>> is supposed to be solely Amiga OSs or not. I gather it's not.
>
> Its all in the bug report. profile-binary.img should be it.
>
> Its small so I attach it.
>
> Meanwhile I try to get the currently supported maximum disk size out 
from
> the OS 4 developers. Maybe JXFS is playing tricks that other 
filesystems do
> not play or simply has a different implementation.
>
> Thanks,

I've sent Jens a proposed fix changing these lines in amiga.c.
===8<--- was
         struct PartitionBlock *pb;
         int start_sect, nr_sects, blk, part, res = 0;
         int blksize = 1;        /* Multiplier for disk block size */
===8<--- becomes changing line 338 into lines 338-339
         struct PartitionBlock *pb;
         sector_t start_sect, nr_sects;
         int blk, part, res = 0;
         int blksize = 1;        /* Multiplier for disk block size */
===8<---

(I'm working without proper tools at the moment or I'd make a real diff.
Sorry.)

This fix may not be complete. The RDBs contain provisions for describing
the physical disk block size and how many physical blocks are used in a
file system's logical blocks. This MAY not work quite right large 
physical
block sizes.

{^_^}   Joanne Dow
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-------------------------------------------------------------
[…]

> As long as there's someone who can be pestered with bugs, I don't see
> the need to push their baby out of the tree.  I'm a bit more nervous
> about hfsplus; if it has users and no maintainer, those users are at
> risk.
> 
> Perhaps we could advertise on Craigslist or something ... maintainer
> wanted for LTR.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin