More on this when explaining compressed mids, but basically the idea is
instead of just storing all mdirs in our mtree as single element
entries, store each mdir in as a weighted entry, where the weight is a
known upper bound on the possible number of mid entries in a single
mdir.
With the current mid representation, this just complicates things
without much benefits. But with compressed mids it allows us to lookup
mdirs with the mid directly, and avoid decoding the bid from the mid in
some cases.
The mid-per-mdir upper bound is derived from the block size. We know:
1. Each tag needs <=2 alts+null with our current compaction strategy
2. Each tag/alt encodes to a minimum of 4 bytes
This gives us ~4*4 or ~16 bytes per mid at minimum. If we cram an mdir
with the smallest possible mids, this gives us at most ~block_size/16
mids in a single mdir before the mdir runs out of space.
Note we can't assume ~1/2 block utilization here, as an mdir may
temporarily fill with more mids before compaction occurs.
This is an intermediate commit as a part of a tangent into compressed
mids.
The idea here, is instead of using bid=-1 as a special value for mroots,
use only the top bit to indicate mroots. This allows you to compare
against the grm/other uninlined mids by masking instead of signed
comparison.
This is valuable for compressed mids since extracting bids relies on
knowledge of the block size, and becomes quite a bit more expensive.
mroot bid mroot cmp
before: 0xffffffff lfs_smax32(a, 0) == lfs_smax32(b, 0)
after: 0x80000000 (a & 0x7fffffff) == (b & 0x7fffffff)
The implementation here is a bit clumsy. I think GCC may be not that
great at optimizing out copies of structs being passed around via
inlined functions. But this is only a proof-of-concept.
Note this required changing the INLINED tag to REG in most of the tests,
because our mtree now explicitly requires some sort of NAME tag.
We can also finally see the impact on code and RAM from this restructure:
code stack
before (push/set/pop/split): 21750 1928
after (commit): 20970 (-3.7%) 1744 (-10.6%)
Not too shabby if I say so myself.
Generally the more creative you get with C macros, the more
unmaintainable your codebase becomes, but in this case I think a small
bit of macro sugar for the attribute lists in littlefs goes a long way
for making the internals flexible and readable.
Attribute lists generally look like this:
LFSR_ATTRS(
LFSR_ATTR(id, TAG, delta, DATA(data)),
LFSR_ATTR(id, TAG, delta, DATA(data)),
...
LFSR_ATTR(id, TAG, delta, DATA(data)))
Which more-or-less gets expanded to this:
((const lfsr_attr_t[]){
((lfsr_attr_t){id, LFSR_TAG_TAG, delta, LFSR_DATA_DATA(data)}),
((lfsr_attr_t){id, LFSR_TAG_TAG, delta, LFSR_DATA_DATA(data)}),
...
((lfsr_attr_t){id, LFSR_TAG_TAG, delta, LFSR_DATA_DATA(data)}),}),
attr_count
Note the use of preprocessor concatenation to put the TAG and DATA
identifiers in their respective namespaces. These can end up invoking
other macros, which allows attrs to be rather extensible.
Previously there were also LFSR_ATTR_ (note the trailing underscore)
macros to allow passing of variable tags/datas. This is replaced with
redundant macros which sort of "unwrap" themselves as a part of macro
expansion. This avoids a bunch of duplicate macro definitions.
#define LFSR_TAG_TAG(tag) (tag)
#define LFSR_DATA_DATA(data) (data)
So:
LFSR_ATTR(id, TAG(tag), delta, DATA(data))
Becomes:
((lfsr_attr_t){id, LFSR_TAG_TAG(tag), delta, LFSR_DATA_DATA(data)})
Becomes:
((lfsr_attr_t){id, tag, delta, data})
This turned out to be tricky.
At littlefs's core, we have the lfsr_rbyd_t struct. It is really
important this is as small as possible since littlefs creates many rbyd
copies in order to track state of metadata on disk.
Wrapping rbyd, we have the lfsr_btree_t struct, which can alternatively
contain a single inlined entry, accomplished by overlapping the width
field in both cases. And the lfsr_mdir_t struct, which tracks any redundant
blocks, and would be nice if the blocks lined up as neighbors so all blocks
involved in the mdir could be passed around as an array. Both of these
wrappers attempt to overlap fields of the lfsr_rbyd_t struct, which presents
a bit of a problem.
The solution here is to put the rbyd block field at the beginning of the
lfsr_rbyd_t struct, and use exactly 32-bits of padding in lfsr_btree_t
to overlap the width field even though it is not at the beginning of the
struct. To avoid inflating the lfsr_btree_t size, we sneak the inlined
size and tag into the overlapping padding. This will need special
handling if the size of these fields change, but saves a decent amount
of RAM:
lfsr_rbyd_t lfsr_btree_t lfsr_mdir_t
8b 8b 8b 8b
.----+----+----+----.
| mid.bid | mid.rid |
|----+----+----+----|
8b 8b 8b 8b 8b 8b 8b 8b | blocks |
.----+----+----+----. .----+----+----+----. | |
| block |..| tag |size|padd|.>| |
|----+----+----+----| |----+----+----+----| |----+----+----+----|
| weight |.>| weight | | weight |
|----+----+----+----| |----+----+----+----| |----+----+----+----|
| trunk | | inlined data | | trunk |
|----+----+----+----| | | | |----+----+----+----|
| off | | v | | off |
|----+----+----+----| | | |----+----+----+----|
| crc | | | | crc |
'----+----+----+----' '----+----+----+----' '----+----+----+----'
Also tried to reduce the amount of mdir usage in lfsr_mdir_commit by
better using only the arrays of relevant mdir blocks, to limited success.
The previous system of relying on test name prefixes for ordering was
simple, but organizing tests by dependencies and topologically sorting
during compilation is 1. more flexible and 2. simplifies test names,
which get typed a lot.
Note these are not "hard" dependencies, each test suite should work fine
in isolation. These "after" dependencies just hint an ordering when all
tests are ran.
As such, it's worth noting the tests should NOT error of a dependency is
missing. This unfortunately makes it a bit hard to catch typos, but
allows faster compilation of a subset of tests.
---
To make this work the way tests are linked has changed from using custom
linker section (fun linker magic!) to a weakly linked array appended to
every source file (also fun linker magic!).
At least with this method test.py has strict control over the test
ordering, and doesn't depend on 1. the order in which the linker merges
sections, and 2. the order tests are passed to test.py. I didn't realize
the previous system was so fragile.
It doesn't make sense to test more complex logic, such as t2_btree.toml,
when the logic it is built on, t1_rbyd.toml, does not past testing. The
test runner already guarantees a consistent lexicographic order, so all
we need to do is renamed these from test_* -> tn_*.
Note, if we every have more than 10 tests, we will need to bump up the
number of digits for all tests, so t1_rbyd.toml -> t01_rbyd.toml. This
is the main downside of lexicographic ordering. But we'll cross that
bridge when we get to it.
Took the opportunity to make some allocator tweaks:
- Renamed lfs.free -> lfs.lookahead, it's previous name did cause some
confusion.
- Renamed lfs.free.off -> lfs.lookahead.start
- Renamed lfs.free.i -> lfs.lookahead.next
- Renamed lfs.free.ack -> lfs.lookahead.acked
- Changed bitmap from using 32-bit words to using 8-bit bytes, dropping
the alignment requirement. One of the reasons for 32-bit alignment was
an attempt at future proofing for some sort of free-list.
This never landed, and if it did, it could have been provided without
breaking backwards compatiblity via an additional config option, at a
minor RAM cost.
We never used ffs/clz instructions for this bitmap, so I don't think
using 32-bit words offers much advantage. It just creates another
potential issue for users if their lookahead buffer is unaligned.
These changes should probably also be upstreamed to the current version.
They don't depend on anything rbyd specific.
Note, at some point lfs_alloc will need to be extended to mark block tags,
etc, as in-use during traversal.
This makes it easier to evaluate the code/stack/etc sizes and run tests
without bringing in all of the outdated code.
I guess this officially makes this branch more-or-less a full rewrite,
though the benefit of commenting vs deleting this code is that it can be
easily pulled back in when useful.
These are really just different flavors of test.py and test_runner.c
without support for power-loss testing, but with support for measuring
the cumulative number of bytes read, programmed, and erased.
Note that the existing define parameterization should work perfectly
fine for running benchmarks across various dimensions:
./scripts/bench.py \
runners/bench_runner \
bench_file_read \
-gnor \
-DSIZE='range(0,131072,1024)'
Also added a couple basic benchmarks as a starting point.
The main benefit is small test ids everywhere, though this is with the
downside of needing longer names to properly prefix and avoid
collisions. But this fits into the rest of the scripts with globally
unique names a bit better. This is a C project after all.
The other small benefit is test generators may have an easier time since
per-case symbols can expect to be unique.
This mostly required names for each test case, declarations of
previously-implicit variables since the new test framework is more
conservative with what it declares (the small extra effort to add
declarations is well worth the simplicity and improved readability),
and tweaks to work with not-really-constant defines.
Also renamed test_ -> test, replacing the old ./scripts/test.py,
unfortunately git seems to have had a hard time with this.
Moved .travis.yml over to use the new test framework. A part of this
involved testing all of the configurations ran on the old framework
and deciding which to carry over. The new framework duplicates some of
the cases tested by the configurations so some configurations could be
dropped.
The .travis.yml includes some extreme ones, such as no inline files,
relocations every cycle, no intrinsics, power-loss every byte, unaligned
block_count and lookahead, and odd read_sizes.
There were several configurations were some tests failed because of
limitations in the tests themselves, so many conditions were added
to make sure the configurations can run on as many tests as possible.
Fixes:
- Fixed reproducability issue when we can't read a directory revision
- Fixed incorrect erase assumption if lfs_dir_fetch exceeds block size
- Fixed cleanup issue caused by lfs_fs_relocate failing when trying to
outline a file in lfs_file_sync
- Fixed cleanup issue if we run out of space while extending a CTZ skip-list
- Fixed missing half-orphans when allocating blocks during lfs_fs_deorphan
Also:
- Added cycle-detection to readtree.py
- Allowed pseudo-C expressions in test conditions (and it's
beautifully hacky, see line 187 of test.py)
- Better handling of ctrl-C during test runs
- Added build-only mode to test.py
- Limited stdout of test failures to 5 lines unless in verbose mode
Explanation of fixes below
1. Fixed reproducability issue when we can't read a directory revision
An interesting subtlety of the block-device layer is that the
block-device is allowed to return LFS_ERR_CORRUPT on reads to
untouched blocks. This can easily happen if a user is using ECC or
some sort of CMAC on their blocks. Normally we never run into this,
except for the optimization around directory revisions where we use
uninitialized data to start our revision count.
We correctly handle this case by ignoring whats on disk if the read
fails, but end up using unitialized RAM instead. This is not an issue
for normal use, though it can lead to a small information leak.
However it creates a big problem for reproducability, which is very
helpful for debugging.
I ended up running into a case where the RAM values for the revision
count was different, causing two identical runs to wear-level at
different times, leading to one version running out of space before a
bug occured because it expanded the superblock early.
2. Fixed incorrect erase assumption if lfs_dir_fetch exceeds block size
This could be caused if the previous tag was a valid commit and we
lost power causing a partially written tag as the start of a new
commit.
Fortunately we already have a separate condition for exceeding the
block size, so we can force that case to always treat the mdir as
unerased.
3. Fixed cleanup issue caused by lfs_fs_relocate failing when trying to
outline a file in lfs_file_sync
Most operations involving metadata-pairs treat the mdir struct as
entirely temporary and throw it out if any error occurs. Except for
lfs_file_sync since the mdir is also a part of the file struct.
This is relevant because of a cleanup issue in lfs_dir_compact that
usually doesn't have side-effects. The issue is that lfs_fs_relocate
can fail. It needs to allocate new blocks to relocate to, and as the
disk reaches its end of life, it can fail with ENOSPC quite often.
If lfs_fs_relocate fails, the containing lfs_dir_compact would return
immediately without restoring the previous state of the mdir. If a new
commit comes in on the same mdir, the old state left there could
corrupt the filesystem.
It's interesting to note this is forced to happen in lfs_file_sync,
since it always tries to outline the file if it gets ENOSPC (ENOSPC
can mean both no blocks to allocate and that the mdir is full). I'm
not actually sure this bit of code is necessary anymore, we may be
able to remove it.
4. Fixed cleanup issue if we run out of space while extending a CTZ
skip-list
The actually CTZ skip-list logic itself hasn't been touched in more
than a year at this point, so I was surprised to find a bug here. But
it turns out the CTZ skip-list could be put in an invalid state if we
run out of space while trying to extend the skip-list.
This only becomes a problem if we keep the file open, clean up some
space elsewhere, and then continue to write to the open file without
modifying it. Fortunately an easy fix.
5. Fixed missing half-orphans when allocating blocks during
lfs_fs_deorphan
This was a really interesting bug. Normally, we don't have to worry
about allocations, since we force consistency before we are allowed
to allocate blocks. But what about the deorphan operation itself?
Don't we need to allocate blocks if we relocate while deorphaning?
It turns out the deorphan operation can lead to allocating blocks
while there's still orphans and half-orphans on the threaded
linked-list. Orphans aren't an issue, but half-orphans may contain
references to blocks in the outdated half, which doesn't get scanned
during the normal allocation pass.
Fortunately we already fetch directory entries to check CTZ lists, so
we can also check half-orphans here. However this causes
lfs_fs_traverse to duplicate all metadata-pairs, not sure what to do
about this yet.
- Removed old tests and test scripts
- Reorganize the block devices to live under one directory
- Plugged new test framework into Makefile
renamed:
- scripts/test_.py -> scripts/test.py
- tests_ -> tests
- {file,ram,test}bd/* -> bd/*
It took a surprising amount of effort to make the Makefile behave since
it turns out the "test_%" rule could override "tests/test_%.toml.test"
which is generated as part of test.py.
Christopher Haster