These ioctls let a user application hold a transaction open while it
performs a series of operations. A final ioctl does a sync on the fs
(closing the current transaction). This is the main requirement for
Ceph's OSD to be able to keep the data it's storing in a btrfs volume
consistent, and AFAICS it works just fine. The application would do
something like
fd = ::open("some/file", O_RDONLY);
::ioctl(fd, BTRFS_IOC_TRANS_START);
/* do a bunch of stuff */
::ioctl(fd, BTRFS_IOC_TRANS_END);
or just
::close(fd);
And to ensure it commits to disk,
::ioctl(fd, BTRFS_IOC_SYNC);
When a transaction is held open, the trans_handle is attached to the
struct file (via private_data) so that it will get cleaned up if the
process dies unexpectedly. A held transaction is also ended on fsync() to
avoid a deadlock.
A misbehaving application could also deliberately hold a transaction open,
effectively locking up the FS, so it may make sense to restrict something
like this to root or something.
Signed-off-by: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
This adds two types of btree defrag, a run time form that tries to
defrag recently allocated blocks in the btree when they are still in ram,
and an ioctl that forces defrag of all btree blocks.
File data blocks are not defragged yet, but this can make a huge difference
in sequential btree reads.
Signed-off-by: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
