# Copyright (C) 2010-2016 Junjiro R. Okajima # # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program. If not, see . Dynamically customizable FS operations ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Generally FS operations (struct inode_operations, struct address_space_operations, struct file_operations, etc.) are defined as "static const", but it never means that FS have only one set of operation. Some FS have multiple sets of them. For instance, ext2 has three sets, one for XIP, for NOBH, and for normal. Since aufs overrides and redirects these operations, sometimes aufs has to change its behaviour according to the branch FS type. More importantly VFS acts differently if a function (member in the struct) is set or not. It means aufs should have several sets of operations and select one among them according to the branch FS definition. In order to solve this problem and not to affect the behaviour of VFS, aufs defines these operations dynamically. For instance, aufs defines dummy direct_IO function for struct address_space_operations, but it may not be set to the address_space_operations actually. When the branch FS doesn't have it, aufs doesn't set it to its address_space_operations while the function definition itself is still alive. So the behaviour itself will not change, and it will return an error when direct_IO is not set. The lifetime of these dynamically generated operation object is maintained by aufs branch object. When the branch is removed from aufs, the reference counter of the object is decremented. When it reaches zero, the dynamically generated operation object will be freed. This approach is designed to support AIO (io_submit), Direct I/O and XIP (DAX) mainly. Currently this approach is applied to address_space_operations for regular files only.