pohmlefs got hardlink and socket/pipe support
While adding pipe/socket is pretty much straightforward – it is just another inode types, which have full VFS implemnetation in kernel, hardlinks are much harder.
Basically saying, hardlink is a link to inode, so that updates made through one path ended up with new data read from all other hardlinked pathes. Removing one hardlink may not end up removing whole fie, instead there should be some kind of reference counter – we only remove file’s data when there are no more hardlinks to given file, and of course when we remove file by original path, we can not remove its data, if it can be accessed via its hardlinks.
POHMELFS uses elliptics as its data storage backend, which supports atomic transactions per replica and per-column data IO. So I put reference counter update into elliptics server-side script, which is called for every unlink and hardlink creation command.
Scripts are executed atomically against other operations for given key, but only on single replica. It is possible that different operations with the same key are executed on different replicas, but for unlink it does not matter – if we drop refcnt by removing ‘hardlink-1′ and then original path or vice versa data will only be removed when last reference drops to zero (actually to -1, since for performance reasons we do not create reference counter for plain object, only for its hardlinks).
Last weeks we extensively tested POHMELFS in a lab, but its time to move it to small testing environment, which mimics behaviour of one of our large systems. We will setup all software we use daily there and start looking for real bugs.
Getting our previous testing ‘mode’ (we synced about hundred of terabytes of files of different sizes) I do not expect any problems to arise.
Still, I want http compatibility mode, when we save files with IDs generated from full path length. This implies that move is not supported, but it is a special case where we can afford this. Basically we want it to write data via POHMELFS for performance and then read it via HTTP.
Stay tuned, I will send kernel inclusion request next week. First patch will replace drivers/staging/pohmelfs with this new code. Hopefully it will move into fs/ in some next release.
Pohmelfs got quorum read support pohmelfs got http compatibility support
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