Re: [PATCH 00/17] VFS: Filesystem information and notifications [ver #17]

[Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 6:15 PM Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 05:24:23PM +0100, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 1:27 PM Greg Kroah-Hartman
> > <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> >
> > > > Superblocks and mounts could get enumerated by a unique identifier.
> > > > mnt_id seems to be good for mounts, s_dev may or may not be good for
> > > > superblock, but  s_id (as introduced in this patchset) could be used
> > > > instead.
> > >
> > > So what would the sysfs tree look like with this?
> >
> > For a start something like this:
> >
> > mounts/$MOUNT_ID/
> >   parent -> ../$PARENT_ID
> >   super -> ../../supers/$SUPER_ID
> >   root: path from mount root to fs root (could be optional as usually
> > they are the same)
> >   mountpoint -> $MOUNTPOINT
> >   flags: mount flags
> >   propagation: mount propagation
> >   children/$CHILD_ID -> ../../$CHILD_ID
> >
> >  supers/$SUPER_ID/
> >    type: fstype
> >    source: mount source (devname)
> >    options: csv of mount options
>
> Oh, wonderful.  So let me see if I got it right - any namespace operation
> can create/destroy/move around an arbitrary amount of sysfs objects.

Parent/children symlinks may be excessive...

> Better yet, we suddenly have to express the lifetime rules for struct mount
> and struct superblock in terms of struct device garbage.

How so?   struct mount and struct superblock would hold a ref on
struct device, not the other way round.

In any case, I'm not insistent on the use of sysfs device classes for
this; struct device (488B) does seem too heavy for struct mount
(328B).

What I'm pretty sure about is that a read(2) based interface would be
way more useful than the syscall multiplexer that the current proposal
is.

Thanks,
Miklos