zonefs: Dynamically create file inodes when needed

Allocating and initializing all inodes and dentries for all files
results in a very large memory usage with high capacity zoned block
devices. For instance, with a 26 TB SMR HDD with over 96000 zones,
mounting the disk with zonefs results in about 130 MB of memory used,
the vast majority of this space being used for vfs inodes and dentries.

However, since a user will rarely access all zones at the same time,
dynamically creating file inodes and dentries on demand, similarly to
regular file systems, can significantly reduce memory usage.

This patch modifies mount processing to not create the inodes and
dentries for zone files. Instead, the directory inode operation
zonefs_lookup() and directory file operation zonefs_readdir() are
introduced to allocate and initialize inodes on-demand using the helper
functions zonefs_get_dir_inode() and zonefs_get_zgroup_inode().

Implementation of these functions is simple, relying on the static
nature of zonefs directories and files. Directory inodes are linked to
the volume zone groups (struct zonefs_zone_group) they represent by
using the directory inode i_private field. This simplifies the
implementation of the lookup and readdir operations.

Unreferenced zone file inodes can be evicted from the inode cache at any
time. In such case, the only inode information that cannot be recreated
from the zone information that is saved in the zone group data
structures attached to the volume super block is the inode uid, gid and
access rights. These values may have been changed by the user. To keep
these attributes for the life time of the mount, as before, the inode
mode, uid and gid are saved in the inode zone information and the saved
values are used to initialize regular file inodes when an inode lookup
happens. The zone information mode, uid and gid are initialized in
zonefs_init_zgroup() using the default values.

With these changes, the static minimal memory usage of a zonefs volume
is mostly reduced to the array of zone information for each zone group.
For the 26 TB SMR hard-disk mentioned above, the memory usage after
mount becomes about 5.4 MB, a reduction by a factor of 24 from the
initial 130 MB memory use.

Co-developed-by: Jorgen Hansen <Jorgen.Hansen@wdc.com>
Signed-off-by: Damien Le Moal <damien.lemoal@opensource.wdc.com>
Reviewed-by: Johannes Thumshirn <johannes.thumshirn@wdc.com>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/zonefs/zonefs.h b/fs/zonefs/zonefs.h
index 2d626e18b141..f88466a4158b 100644
--- a/fs/zonefs/zonefs.h
+++ b/fs/zonefs/zonefs.h
@@ -64,6 +64,11 @@ struct zonefs_zone {
 
 	/* Write pointer offset in the zone (sequential zones only, bytes) */
 	loff_t			z_wpoffset;
+
+	/* Saved inode uid, gid and access rights */
+	umode_t			z_mode;
+	kuid_t			z_uid;
+	kgid_t			z_gid;
 };
 
 /*
@@ -265,6 +270,10 @@ static inline void zonefs_io_error(struct inode *inode, bool write)
 	mutex_unlock(&zi->i_truncate_mutex);
 }
 
+/* In super.c */
+extern const struct inode_operations zonefs_dir_inode_operations;
+extern const struct file_operations zonefs_dir_operations;
+
 /* In file.c */
 extern const struct address_space_operations zonefs_file_aops;
 extern const struct file_operations zonefs_file_operations;