Sage Weil 6bf13c0cc8 Btrfs: transaction ioctls ... These ioctls let a user application hold a transaction open while it performs a series of operations. A final ioctl does a sync on the fs (closing the current transaction). This is the main requirement for Ceph's OSD to be able to keep the data it's storing in a btrfs volume consistent, and AFAICS it works just fine. The application would do something like fd = ::open("some/file", O_RDONLY); ::ioctl(fd, BTRFS_IOC_TRANS_START); /* do a bunch of stuff */ ::ioctl(fd, BTRFS_IOC_TRANS_END); or just ::close(fd); And to ensure it commits to disk, ::ioctl(fd, BTRFS_IOC_SYNC); When a transaction is held open, the trans_handle is attached to the struct file (via private_data) so that it will get cleaned up if the process dies unexpectedly. A held transaction is also ended on fsync() to avoid a deadlock. A misbehaving application could also deliberately hold a transaction open, effectively locking up the FS, so it may make sense to restrict something like this to root or something. Signed-off-by: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>		2008-09-25 11:04:03 -04:00
fs/btrfs	Btrfs: transaction ioctls	2008-09-25 11:04:03 -04:00