FUSE: Notifying the kernel of deletion.

Allows a FUSE file-system to tell the kernel when a file or directory is
deleted. If the specified dentry has the specified inode number, the kernel will
unhash it.

The current 'fuse_notify_inval_entry' does not cause the kernel to clean up
directories that are in use properly, and as a result the users of those
directories see incorrect semantics from the file-system. The error condition
seen when 'fuse_notify_inval_entry' is used to notify of a deleted directory is
avoided when 'fuse_notify_delete' is used instead.

The following scenario demonstrates the difference:
1. User A chdirs into 'testdir' and starts reading 'testfile'.
2. User B rm -rf 'testdir'.
3. User B creates 'testdir'.
4. User C chdirs into 'testdir'.

If you run the above within the same machine on any file-system (including fuse
file-systems), there is no problem: user C is able to chdir into the new
testdir. The old testdir is removed from the dentry tree, but still open by user
A.

If operations 2 and 3 are performed via the network such that the fuse
file-system uses one of the notify functions to tell the kernel that the nodes
are gone, then the following error occurs for user C while user A holds the
original directory open:

muirj@empacher:~> ls /test/testdir
ls: cannot access /test/testdir: No such file or directory

The issue here is that the kernel still has a dentry for testdir, and so it is
requesting the attributes for the old directory, while the file-system is
responding that the directory no longer exists.

If on the other hand, if the file-system can notify the kernel that the
directory is deleted using the new 'fuse_notify_delete' function, then the above
ls will find the new directory as expected.

Signed-off-by: John Muir <john@jmuir.com>
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fuse.h b/include/linux/fuse.h
index 446c89718b9..8ba2c9460b2 100644
--- a/include/linux/fuse.h
+++ b/include/linux/fuse.h
@@ -53,6 +53,7 @@
  *
  * 7.18
  *  - add FUSE_IOCTL_DIR flag
+ *  - add FUSE_NOTIFY_DELETE
  */
 
 #ifndef _LINUX_FUSE_H
@@ -288,6 +289,7 @@ enum fuse_notify_code {
 	FUSE_NOTIFY_INVAL_ENTRY = 3,
 	FUSE_NOTIFY_STORE = 4,
 	FUSE_NOTIFY_RETRIEVE = 5,
+	FUSE_NOTIFY_DELETE = 6,
 	FUSE_NOTIFY_CODE_MAX,
 };
 
@@ -611,6 +613,13 @@ struct fuse_notify_inval_entry_out {
 	__u32	padding;
 };
 
+struct fuse_notify_delete_out {
+	__u64	parent;
+	__u64	child;
+	__u32	namelen;
+	__u32	padding;
+};
+
 struct fuse_notify_store_out {
 	__u64	nodeid;
 	__u64	offset;