docs: Document the FAN_FS_ERROR event

Document the FAN_FS_ERROR event for user administrators and user space
developers.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20211025192746.66445-32-krisman@collabora.com
Reviewed-by: Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Gabriel Krisman Bertazi <krisman@collabora.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>

1 files changed, 74 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/filesystem-monitoring.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/filesystem-monitoring.rst
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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+====================================
+File system Monitoring with fanotify
+====================================
+
+File system Error Reporting
+===========================
+
+Fanotify supports the FAN_FS_ERROR event type for file system-wide error
+reporting.  It is meant to be used by file system health monitoring
+daemons, which listen for these events and take actions (notify
+sysadmin, start recovery) when a file system problem is detected.
+
+By design, a FAN_FS_ERROR notification exposes sufficient information
+for a monitoring tool to know a problem in the file system has happened.
+It doesn't necessarily provide a user space application with semantics
+to verify an IO operation was successfully executed.  That is out of
+scope for this feature.  Instead, it is only meant as a framework for
+early file system problem detection and reporting recovery tools.
+
+When a file system operation fails, it is common for dozens of kernel
+errors to cascade after the initial failure, hiding the original failure
+log, which is usually the most useful debug data to troubleshoot the
+problem.  For this reason, FAN_FS_ERROR tries to report only the first
+error that occurred for a file system since the last notification, and
+it simply counts additional errors.  This ensures that the most
+important pieces of information are never lost.
+
+FAN_FS_ERROR requires the fanotify group to be setup with the
+FAN_REPORT_FID flag.
+
+At the time of this writing, the only file system that emits FAN_FS_ERROR
+notifications is Ext4.
+
+A FAN_FS_ERROR Notification has the following format::
+
+  [ Notification Metadata (Mandatory) ]
+  [ Generic Error Record  (Mandatory) ]
+  [ FID record            (Mandatory) ]
+
+The order of records is not guaranteed, and new records might be added
+in the future.  Therefore, applications must not rely on the order and
+must be prepared to skip over unknown records. Please refer to
+``samples/fanotify/fs-monitor.c`` for an example parser.
+
+Generic error record
+--------------------
+
+The generic error record provides enough information for a file system
+agnostic tool to learn about a problem in the file system, without
+providing any additional details about the problem.  This record is
+identified by ``struct fanotify_event_info_header.info_type`` being set
+to FAN_EVENT_INFO_TYPE_ERROR.
+
+  struct fanotify_event_info_error {
+	struct fanotify_event_info_header hdr;
+	__s32 error;
+	__u32 error_count;
+  };
+
+The `error` field identifies the type of error using errno values.
+`error_count` tracks the number of errors that occurred and were
+suppressed to preserve the original error information, since the last
+notification.
+
+FID record
+----------
+
+The FID record can be used to uniquely identify the inode that triggered
+the error through the combination of fsid and file handle.  A file system
+specific application can use that information to attempt a recovery
+procedure.  Errors that are not related to an inode are reported with an
+empty file handle of type FILEID_INVALID.