We'll always have "bare" mode for keeping files-as-hardlinks as root.
But "archive" was my second attempt at a format for non-root file
storage, used by the gnome-ostree buildsystem which runs as non-root.
It was really handy to have a "tar" like mode where I can create
tarballs as a user, that contain files owned by root for example.
The "archive" mode stored content files as two pieces in the
filesystem; ".file" contained metadata, and ".filecontent" was the
actual content, uncompressed. The nice thing about this was that to
check out a tree as non-root, you could just hardlink into the repo.
However, archive was fairly bad for serving via HTTP; it required
*two* HTTP requests per content object, greatly magnifing the already
inefficient fetch process. So "archive-z2" was introduced.
To allow gnome-ostree to still check out trees as a user, the
"uncompressed-object-cache" was introduced, and that's how things have
been working for a while.
So we should just be able to kill this code. Specifically note just
how much better the stage_object() function became.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=706057
We have APIs to load metadata as variants, and files as parsed
content/info/xattrs, but for some cases such as static deltas, all we
want is to operate on all objects in their canonical representation.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=706031
We used to have a version of this, but since I'm trying to use
GBytes more, this became a more common operation, and it's annoying
to type out the whole G_VARIANT_TYPE ("ay") each time, and pass
TRUE for trusted.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=706031
If we pass XATTR_REPLACE then the attribute must already exist, which
is not our intent. Passing zero creates the attribute if necessary,
or replaces it when it already exists.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=705893
While the actual commit object format is presently the same, for a
number of reasons we'd like to change it fairly radically. Among
other things, we need to drop our a{sv} types in objects, to protect
against GVariant changing format.
Since now gnome-ostree now longer uses related objects, and nothing
ever used metadata, just drop them both.
If the admin encounters corruption and does:
$ ostree admin fsck --delete
We want them to be able to recover the objects easily from the
network; with this patch, they do:
$ ln -s dummyvalue /ostree/repo/transaction
$ ostree refs --delete remotename:branchname
$ ostree pull remotename
This patch avoids the need for the refs --delete; we might as well
force scan the commit, and with this patch we still print that it
changed.
While the first was useful way back in the day when we were importing
Debian bits and /sbin/init was expecting to find /dev/.initctl as a
named pipe, that's no longer an issue with systemd since it uses
dynamic Unix sockets.
Likewise, character and block devices in /dev are now dynamically
created by the devtmpfs from the kernel.
Less complexity and code here if we just support directories, regular
files, and symbolic links.
If pull is interrupted, we may have downloaded an arbitrary subset of
the requested objects. Previously, we handled this by scanning for
all objects each time.
However, there's an easy optimization - this patch creates a lock file
in the repo. If we don't see that file when starting a pull, we know
we don't need to stat() every file; presence of a dirtree object for
example implies the existence of everything it references.
Originally, the idea was that clients would replicate "OS/tree"s from
a build server, but we'd run things like "ldconfig" on the client.
This was to allow adding e.g. the nVidia binary driver.
However, the triggers were the only thing in the system at the moment
that really had expected knowledge of the *contents* of the OS, like
the location of binaries.
For now, it's architecturally cleaner if we move the burden of
triggers to the tree builder (e.g. gnome-ostree or RPM). Eventually
we may want OSTree to assist with this type of thing (perhaps
something like RPM %ghost), but this is the right thing to do now.
When multiple threads need to uncompress an object, there was
a race condition where thread A could get EEXIST, unlink,
then thread B calls linkat(), then thread A tries to link() but
fails.
We can just loop in this case.
Previously we'd open(path, O_NOATIME) and do a series of small read()
calls to just parse the header. I think this will trigger kernel readahead
into the compressed portion, but we don't care about that.
This should be more efficient.
This seems to work around a likely Linux kernel VFS bug, where I
randomly see ENOENT on link() when we *definitely* called mkdir() at
an earlier point in time.
This is an incompatible change to archive-z, thus it is now renamed to
archive-z2 and ostree will no longer parse archive-z.
I noticed in perf that we were spending some time zlib-decompressing
file headers, which is just inefficient. Rather than do this, keep
the headers uncompressed, and just zlib-compress content.
This gives us something closer to the advantages of archive and
archive-z when using the latter. Concretely we get deduplication
among multiple checkouts, along with the "devino" hash table trick
during commits to avoid checksumming content again.
This is enabled by default.
For similar reasons as metadata, this avoids having the main thread
blocked in fdatasync(), and even better - we can achieve much higher
parallelism if we have multiple threads blocked on fdatasync().
This is where loose content objects are stored as one compressed file,
instead of the two separate ones for regular archive mode. This mode
would be suitable for HTTP servers, beause only one HTTP request is
necessary, and the result would be compressed.
Cleanly separate metadata/content APIs, rather than defaulting to
raw streams. This helps most use cases.
Also, drop support for staging content without knowing the total
length. This complicated the code, and for things like streaming
HTTP, we should be able to figure this out from Content-Length.
They're not a large efficiency win at the moment, because we don't
do any delta compression.
At the moment, they simply served to compress data, but we will change
the archive mode to do that by default.
First, move deployments to /ostree/deploy. Having them in the
toplevel clutters the filesystem layout too much.
When we deploy a tree like /ostree/deploy/NAME, there is now also a
writable directory /ostree/deploy/NAME-etc. This is mounted as
read-write inside the system.
On an initial install, that directory is copied from
/ostree/deploy/NAME/etc. On subsequent deployments, we find any
changes made in the current deployment's /etc, and apply that set of
changes to the new deployment's /etc.
See https://live.gnome.org/OSTree/EverythingInEtcIsABug
I run builds on my laptop, but it also crashes about 1/4 of the time
while suspending. It's definitely undesrirable to get e.g. empty
.dirtree objects because they corrupt builds. Concretely, I was
getting empty contents committed for xorg-util-macros.
Now, we used to write out temporary files using g_file_replace() which
does a fsync() during close, but then switched to a more "manual"
g_file_append_to().
We could switch back to g_file_replace(), but the problem is, we don't
want to call fsync() on temporary files in the case where we already
have the object. Attempting to add an object we already have is a
*very* common case.
This is both the old and new code sequence for the case where an
object is already stored:
open(temp, O_WRONLY)
write() write() write()
close()
lstat(objects/3a/9fe332...) = 0
unlink(temp)
In the *new* code, here's the case where an object *isn't* stored:
open(temp, O_WRONLY)
write() write() write()
close()
lstat(objects/3a/9fe332...) = -1
open(temp, O_RDONLY)
fdatasync()
close()
rename(temp, objects/3a/9fe332)
Compare with the *old* code path for when an object isn't stored:
open(temp, O_WRONLY)
write() write() write()
close()
lstat(objects/3a/9fe332...) = -1
link(temp, objects/3a/9fe332)
unlink(temp)
The problem with this is we really need to fdatasync(). Also doing
just rename() instead of the weird link()/unlink() helps us express to
the filesystem that we want atomic semantics. For example, BTRFS has
special handling for rename().
We really don't have a sane story for private files. This is a
defensive step ensuring that with old versions of gnome-ostree,
components that mistakenly have un-world-readable files don't break
pulls.
As the manual page doesn't say, but the in-code kernel documentation
shows, hardlinking for normal users can fail for a variety of
reasons (including very common situations such as non regular file
or non writable file), if the owner of the file does not match
the user linking (e.g. when checking out a shadow repo with a root-
owned master).
If that happens, fail back silently to copying instead of aborting
the whole operation.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682298
This helps make things less confusing when we try to create a file not
owned by our uid, such as running ostree-pull as non-root on a
repository owned by root.
Colin Walters
Stef Walter
Giovanni Campagna