On Tue, Jan 07, 2020 at 10:16:14AM -0800, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
Yeah. Fixing that (and maybe adding an ioctl to set the FS UUID online) were on my list for 5.6 but clearly I have to defer everything until 5.7 because we've just run out of time.
Uh... I started looking into unifying the ext4 and xfs defrag ioctl, but gagged when I realized that the ext4 ioctl also handles the data copy inside the kernel. I think that's the sort of behavior we should /not/ allow into the new ioctl, though that also means that the required changes for ext4/e4defrag will be non-trivial.
Well, we should eventually end up with a common defrag tool (e.g. in util-linux). We might as well start of with the xfs_fsr codebase for that or whatever suits us best.
The btrfs defrag ioctl also contains thresholding information and optional knobs to enable compression, which makes me wonder if we should focus narrowly on swapext being "swap these extents but only if the source file hasn't changed" and not necessarily defrag?
That sounds like the most useful common API.
...in which case I wonder, can people (ab)use this interface for atomic file updates? Create an O_TMPFILE, reflink the source file into the temp file, make your updates to the tempfile, and then swapext the donor's file data back into the source file, but only if the source file hasn't changed?
Sure.