[PATCHES] - Statlite Support in Samba/GPFS vfs

Volker Lendecke Volker.Lendecke at SerNet.DE
Tue Sep 30 07:49:59 MDT 2014


On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 04:38:29PM +0530, Shekhar Amlekar wrote:
> Please find attached patches that implement statlite support in Samba and 
> gpfs vfs. Would you please review and let me know any comments/suggestions 
> that you may have.

In general, the patches look good, thanks for that!

> It is known that in clustered file systems, a writer on a node can be 
> slowed down significantly by exact stat calls happening on other nodes. A 
> partial stat, wherever sufficient, helps in such cases. For this purpose, 
> we have support for (l)statlite() in gpfs, that we would like to make use 
> of.
> 
> I've defined following vfs entry points -
> 
> statlite(handle, dirfd, smb_fname, atflag, slitemask);
> fstatlite(handle, fsp, sbuf, slitemask);
> 
> The existing stat/lstat/fstat calls in Samba can be mapped onto above lite 
> variants wherever required, Later, if fstatatlite becomes available, it'd 
> be possible to map the fstatat to statlite vfs call using the dirfd. I'm 
> identifying places in the code where these lite calls can be utilized - 
> and can post those patches later.

Before we put the VFS changes in, I'd like to see some of
the users of the calls. The one very obvious call is in
unix_convert for directories that we just traverse. Here we
don't care about any metadata except whether the name exists
and whether it's a directory or something else. Apart from
that I think we need to take a close look. For example we
might be able to avoid asking for the write timestamp for
files we do have open. There we tend to store the values we
have to report in locking.tdb. What we don't store is the
current file size, so we have to ask for that. It would be
interesting to know from the GPFS people whether we gain
anything by asking only for precise st_size but not for
st_mtime. GPFS might have to pull the inode data anyway if
we have to ask for one precise field. Is GPFS finegrained
enough here?

This might also revive the discussion that was mentioned
http://lwn.net/Articles/394298/ about Linux xstat. I think
that never went anywhere, or am I missing something?

With best regards,

Volker Lendecke

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