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>
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