Patch series "vfs: have syncfs() return error when there are writeback
errors", v6.
Currently, syncfs does not return errors when one of the inodes fails to
be written back. It will return errors based on the legacy AS_EIO and
AS_ENOSPC flags when syncing out the block device fails, but that's not
particularly helpful for filesystems that aren't backed by a blockdev.
It's also possible for a stray sync to lose those errors.
The basic idea in this set is to track writeback errors at the
superblock level, so that we can quickly and easily check whether
something bad happened without having to fsync each file individually.
syncfs is then changed to reliably report writeback errors after they
occur, much in the same fashion as fsync does now.
This patch (of 2):
Usually we suggest that applications call fsync when they want to ensure
that all data written to the file has made it to the backing store, but
that can be inefficient when there are a lot of open files.
Calling syncfs on the filesystem can be more efficient in some
situations, but the error reporting doesn't currently work the way most
people expect. If a single inode on a filesystem reports a writeback
error, syncfs won't necessarily return an error. syncfs only returns an
error if __sync_blockdev fails, and on some filesystems that's a no-op.
It would be better if syncfs reported an error if there were any
writeback failures. Then applications could call syncfs to see if there
are any errors on any open files, and could then call fsync on all of
the other descriptors to figure out which one failed.
This patch adds a new errseq_t to struct super_block, and has
mapping_set_error also record writeback errors there.
To report those errors, we also need to keep an errseq_t in struct file
to act as a cursor. This patch adds a dedicated field for that purpose,
which slots nicely into 4 bytes of padding at the end of struct file on
x86_64.
An earlier version of this patch used an O_PATH file descriptor to cue
the kernel that the open file should track the superblock error and not
the inode's writeback error.
I think that API is just too weird though. This is simpler and should
make syncfs error reporting "just work" even if someone is multiplexing
fsync and syncfs on the same fds.
Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200428135155.19223-1-jlayton@kernel.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200428135155.19223-2-jlayton@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
735e4ae5ba