Re: [PATCH V10 0/5] fuse: Add support for passthrough read/write

[Peng Tao <bergwolf@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 1:00 AM Alessio Balsini <balsini@android.com> wrote:
>
> This is the 10th version of the series. Please find the changelog at the
> bottom of this cover letter.
>
> Add support for file system passthrough read/write of files when enabled in
> userspace through the option FUSE_PASSTHROUGH.
>
> There are file systems based on FUSE that are intended to enforce special
> policies or trigger complicated decision makings at the file operations
> level. Android, for example, uses FUSE to enforce fine-grained access
> policies that also depend on the file contents.
> Sometimes it happens that at open or create time a file is identified as
> not requiring additional checks for consequent reads/writes, thus FUSE
> would simply act as a passive bridge between the process accessing the FUSE
> file system and the lower file system. Splicing and caching help reduce the
> FUSE overhead, but there are still read/write operations forwarded to the
> userspace FUSE daemon that could be avoided.
>
> This series has been inspired by the original patches from Nikhilesh Reddy,
> the idea and code of which has been elaborated and improved thanks to the
> community support.
>
> When the FUSE_PASSTHROUGH capability is enabled, the FUSE daemon may decide
> while handling the open/create operations, if the given file can be
> accessed in passthrough mode. This means that all the further read and
> write operations would be forwarded by the kernel directly to the lower
> file system using the VFS layer rather than to the FUSE daemon.
> All the requests other than reads or writes are still handled by the
> userspace FUSE daemon.
> This allows for improved performance on reads and writes, especially in the
> case of reads at random offsets, for which no (readahead) caching mechanism
> would help.
> Benchmarks show improved performance that is close to native file system
> access when doing massive manipulations on a single opened file, especially
> in the case of random reads, for which the bandwidth increased by almost 2X
> or sequential writes for which the improvement is close to 3X.
>
> The creation of this direct connection (passthrough) between FUSE file
> objects and file objects in the lower file system happens in a way that
> reminds of passing file descriptors via sockets:
> - a process requests the opening of a file handled by FUSE, so the kernel
>   forwards the request to the FUSE daemon;
> - the FUSE daemon opens the target file in the lower file system, getting
>   its file descriptor;
> - the FUSE daemon also decides according to its internal policies if
>   passthrough can be enabled for that file, and, if so, can perform a
>   FUSE_DEV_IOC_PASSTHROUGH_OPEN ioctl() on /dev/fuse, passing the file
>   descriptor obtained at the previous step and the fuse_req unique
>   identifier;
> - the kernel translates the file descriptor to the file pointer navigating
>   through the opened files of the "current" process and temporarily stores
>   it in the associated open/create fuse_req's passthrough_filp;
> - when the FUSE daemon has done with the request and it's time for the
>   kernel to close it, it checks if the passthrough_filp is available and in
>   case updates the additional field in the fuse_file owned by the process
>   accessing the FUSE file system.
> From now on, all the read/write operations performed by that process will
> be redirected to the corresponding lower file system file by creating new
> VFS requests.
> Since the read/write operation to the lower file system is executed with
> the current process's credentials, it might happen that it does not have
> enough privileges to succeed. For this reason, the process temporarily
> receives the same credentials as the FUSE daemon, that are reverted as soon
> as the read/write operation completes, emulating the behavior of the
> request to be performed by the FUSE daemon itself. This solution has been
> inspired by the way overlayfs handles read/write operations.
> Asynchronous IO is supported as well, handled by creating separate AIO
> requests for the lower file system that will be internally tracked by FUSE,
> that intercepts and propagates their completion through an internal
> ki_completed callback similar to the current implementation of overlayfs.
> The ioctl() has been designed taking as a reference and trying to converge
> to the fuse2 implementation. For example, the fuse_passthrough_out data
> structure has extra fields that will allow for further extensions of the
> feature.
>
>
>     Performance on SSD
>
> What follows has been performed with this change [V6] rebased on top of
> vanilla v5.8 Linux kernel, using a custom passthrough_hp FUSE daemon that
> enables pass-through for each file that is opened during both "open" and
> "create". Tests were run on an Intel Xeon E5-2678V3, 32GiB of RAM, with an
> ext4-formatted SSD as the lower file system, with no special tuning, e.g.,
> all the involved processes are SCHED_OTHER, ondemand is the frequency
> governor with no frequency restrictions, and turbo-boost, as well as
> p-state, are active. This is because I noticed that, for such high-level
> benchmarks, results consistency was minimally affected by these features.
> The source code of the updated libfuse library and passthrough_hp is shared
> at the following repository:
>
>     https://github.com/balsini/libfuse/tree/fuse-passthrough-stable-v.3.9.4
The libfuse changes are not updated with the latest ioctl UAPI change yet.

> * UAPI updated: ioctl() now returns an ID that will be used at
>   open/create response time to reference the passthrough file

Cheers,
Tao
-- 
Into Sth. Rich & Strange