virtiofs: propagate sync() to file server

Even if POSIX doesn't mandate it, linux users legitimately expect sync() to
flush all data and metadata to physical storage when it is located on the
same system.  This isn't happening with virtiofs though: sync() inside the
guest returns right away even though data still needs to be flushed from
the host page cache.

This is easily demonstrated by doing the following in the guest:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/foo bs=1M count=5K ; strace -T -e sync sync
5120+0 records in
5120+0 records out
5368709120 bytes (5.4 GB, 5.0 GiB) copied, 5.22224 s, 1.0 GB/s
sync()                                  = 0 <0.024068>

and start the following in the host when the 'dd' command completes
in the guest:

$ strace -T -e fsync /usr/bin/sync virtiofs/foo
fsync(3)                                = 0 <10.371640>

There are no good reasons not to honor the expected behavior of sync()
actually: it gives an unrealistic impression that virtiofs is super fast
and that data has safely landed on HW, which isn't the case obviously.

Implement a ->sync_fs() superblock operation that sends a new FUSE_SYNCFS
request type for this purpose.  Provision a 64-bit placeholder for possible
future extensions.  Since the file server cannot handle the wait == 0 case,
we skip it to avoid a gratuitous roundtrip.  Note that this is
per-superblock: a FUSE_SYNCFS is send for the root mount and for each
submount.

Like with FUSE_FSYNC and FUSE_FSYNCDIR, lack of support for FUSE_SYNCFS in
the file server is treated as permanent success.  This ensures
compatibility with older file servers: the client will get the current
behavior of sync() not being propagated to the file server.

Note that such an operation allows the file server to DoS sync().  Since a
typical FUSE file server is an untrusted piece of software running in
userspace, this is disabled by default.  Only enable it with virtiofs for
now since virtiofsd is supposedly trusted by the guest kernel.

Reported-by: Robert Krawitz <rlk@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kurz <groug@kaod.org>
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@redhat.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions