docs: ext4.rst: document case-insensitive directories
Introduces the case-insensitive features on ext4 for system administrators. Explain the minimum of design decisions that are important for sysadmins wanting to enable this feature. Signed-off-by: Gabriel Krisman Bertazi <krisman@collabora.co.uk> Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
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* large block (up to pagesize) support
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* efficient new ordered mode in JBD2 and ext4 (avoid using buffer head to force
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the ordering)
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* Case-insensitive file name lookups
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[1] Filesystems with a block size of 1k may see a limit imposed by the
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directory hash tree having a maximum depth of two.
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case-insensitive file name lookups
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======================================================
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The case-insensitive file name lookup feature is supported on a
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per-directory basis, allowing the user to mix case-insensitive and
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case-sensitive directories in the same filesystem. It is enabled by
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flipping the +F inode attribute of an empty directory. The
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case-insensitive string match operation is only defined when we know how
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text in encoded in a byte sequence. For that reason, in order to enable
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case-insensitive directories, the filesystem must have the
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casefold feature, which stores the filesystem-wide encoding
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model used. By default, the charset adopted is the latest version of
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Unicode (12.1.0, by the time of this writing), encoded in the UTF-8
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form. The comparison algorithm is implemented by normalizing the
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strings to the Canonical decomposition form, as defined by Unicode,
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followed by a byte per byte comparison.
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The case-awareness is name-preserving on the disk, meaning that the file
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name provided by userspace is a byte-per-byte match to what is actually
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written in the disk. The Unicode normalization format used by the
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kernel is thus an internal representation, and not exposed to the
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userspace nor to the disk, with the important exception of disk hashes,
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used on large case-insensitive directories with DX feature. On DX
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directories, the hash must be calculated using the casefolded version of
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the filename, meaning that the normalization format used actually has an
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impact on where the directory entry is stored.
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When we change from viewing filenames as opaque byte sequences to seeing
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them as encoded strings we need to address what happens when a program
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tries to create a file with an invalid name. The Unicode subsystem
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within the kernel leaves the decision of what to do in this case to the
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filesystem, which select its preferred behavior by enabling/disabling
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the strict mode. When Ext4 encounters one of those strings and the
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filesystem did not require strict mode, it falls back to considering the
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entire string as an opaque byte sequence, which still allows the user to
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operate on that file, but the case-insensitive lookups won't work.
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Options
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=======
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