shmem: stable directory offsets

The current cursor-based directory offset mechanism doesn't work
when a tmpfs filesystem is exported via NFS. This is because NFS
clients do not open directories. Each server-side READDIR operation
has to open the directory, read it, then close it. The cursor state
for that directory, being associated strictly with the opened
struct file, is thus discarded after each NFS READDIR operation.

Directory offsets are cached not only by NFS clients, but also by
user space libraries on those clients. Essentially there is no way
to invalidate those caches when directory offsets have changed on
an NFS server after the offset-to-dentry mapping changes. Thus the
whole application stack depends on unchanging directory offsets.

The solution we've come up with is to make the directory offset for
each file in a tmpfs filesystem stable for the life of the directory
entry it represents.

shmem_readdir() and shmem_dir_llseek() now use an xarray to map each
directory offset (an loff_t integer) to the memory address of a
struct dentry.

Signed-off-by: Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>
Message-Id: <168814734331.530310.3911190551060453102.stgit@manet.1015granger.net>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions