While it may be useful to know when/why lfsr_fs_fixgrm fails, at this
point in lfsr_rename/lfsr_remove the operation has already succeeded as
far as the filesystem is concerned.
It's counterintuitive, but ignoring these errors actually tells the user
_more_ information, specifically whether or not the operation completed
on disk.
At least we can log the error via LFS_WARN, and such errors will likely
come up again in a future operation, such as the call to lfsr_fs_fixgrm
on the next filesystem mutation.
This was noticed in test_grow, which tests error code-paths quite a bit
more than any other test.
Code changes:
code stack
before: 33934 2592
after: 33942 (+0.0%) 2592 (+0.0%)
So LFSR_TAG_MOVE is last, as it's rather complex and also needs to
handle bsprouts/bshrubs.
Compiler noise:
code stack
before: 33926 2592
after: 33934 (+0.0%) 2592 (+0.0%)
Not sure how this was missed for so long, but we completely forget about
in-flight mroot attrs if we happen to uninline the mtree.
I guess this was missed because only some late-stage fs ops need to
commit mroot attrs (lfsr_fs_grow, lfsr_setattr, upgrades, etc), but
being able to commit to the mroot is definitely an operation we need to
support.
Fixing this in a non-awkward way was a bit tricky. We need some way to
commit both the provided attr-list and our new mtree, but all of the
lower layers only accept a single attr-list. The solution here
is to add a special tail-recursive LFSR_TAG_ATTRS that can be used to
chain together multiple attr-lists. This solves the problem quite
elegantly and may actually be useful in the future?
It takes a bit of code:
code stack
before: 33850 2584
after: 33926 (+0.2%) 2592 (+0.3%)
But this solves our final lfsr_fs_grow-related bug. No more mroot-split
hacks in test_grow, and we can now grow any stuck filesystem.
Well this turned into a never-ending can of worms...
I guess the good news is our newly added lfsr_grow_incr_* tests are
_very_ good at finding post-error-resume bugs.
Implementation-wise, this was fairly straightforward thanks to prior
work by BrianPugh, kaetemi, and myself:
1. Made block_count pseudo-optional by adding lfs.block_count so we can
mutate it based on what we find on-disk.
This was done a bit different from the previous implementation,
instead of setting block_count=0 to read the block_count from disk,
we allow any block_count <= the configured block_count.
This matches how we handle name_limit/file_limit/etc, and allows
users to mount a filesystem with unknown block_count while asserting
an upper bound.
2. Added lfsr_fs_grow, which can grow the filesystem.
The is basically the same as the previous implementation except we're
a bit more careful with the lookahead buffer.
I thought the previous impl might have been broken w.r.t. lookahead
buffer, but fortunately it's only broken in a way that makes us think
newly available blocks are temporarily in-use. Which is a bit funny.
One interesting thing that came out with more aggressive tests is
that it's possible to get locked-up in lfsr_fs_preparemutation trying
to clean up grms/orphans before we change the filesystem size.
Fortunately it turns out we don't _really_ need to call
lfsr_fs_preparemutation here. This gets a bit delicate, but means we
should always be able to grow a full filesystem.
To test this I've added both the simple grow/error tests from the
previous version, as well as a set of fuzz tests (a la test_relocations
and friends) that incrementally grow the filesystem when encountering
LFS_ERR_NOSPC. These have a surprising amount coverage, testing
lfsr_fs_grow, lfsr_fs_stat, lfsr_fs_size, and resuming operations after
encountering an error.
Which also means they found bugs:
- lfs_alloc_setinuse was not broken before, because lookahead.start was
always a multiple of lookahead_size. But now with lfs_alloc_discard,
this invariant may not be true.
I've just changed all lookahead.start updates to mod block_count. This
adds a bit of code, but is much easier to reason about.
While fixing this, I also added an assert to never allocate blocks
{0,1} in lfs_alloc. This is a good assert to have, but did require
some tweaks to test_btree to avoid these blocks.
- We were incorrectly patching grms in lfsr_mdir_commit when mdelta=0.
Funnily enough we also proceed to ignore the patched grm most of the
time when mdelta=0, so this went unnoticed.
- It turns out we're completely ignoring rid=-1 attrs if we split the
mroot. Not sure how this was missed. It's a bit important.
Note this is still broken. Fixing this requires some rather invasive
changes to lfsr_mdir_commit's internal logic that should probably be
in another commit...
Note again fwrite_fuzz is omitted. Currently the state of data in opened
files is undefined after a failed write, so this wouldn't really be
testing anything interesting...
More features = more code, and all of this bug fixing meant several
things contributed to code/stack changes in this commit:
code stack
before: 33654 2592
+variable block_count: 33646 (-0.0%) 2584 (+0.0%)
+lfsr_fs_grow: 33818 (+0.5%) 2584 (-0.3%)
+lookahead-start-fix: 33842 (+0.6%) 2584 (-0.3%)
+grm-patch-fix (after): 33850 (+0.6%) 2584 (-0.3%)
Wild that variable block_count actually saves code/stack. I guess the
indirect lfs->cfg->block_count load can get costly...
We really only rely on cksum here.
Passing weight was useful for an assert, but it clutters up the function
call with a parameter that isn't used normally.
Removing ths saves a bit of code:
code stack
before: 33670 2592
after: 33654 (-0.0%) 2592 (+0.0%)
The theory is that lfsr_opened_isopen is a relatively special case, and
the main cause of LFS_ASSERT side-effects. All other LFS_ASSERTs are
either limited to simple expressions, or small static-inline functions.
Unfortunately, even without lfsr_opened_isopen asserts, it seems
asserts-as-hints still results in worse code/stack costs:
code stack
no-assert (before): 33626 2552
hint-assert (after): 33670 (+0.1%) 2592 (+1.6%)
Digging around in the low-level assembly, it seems that what is
happening is the increased number of calls to static-inline functions is
causing the compiler to prefer to not-inline functions more often. Then,
even if calls would be eliminated as dead-code, the damage is done to
the containing function.
It's not entirely clear how this could be avoided. Maybe a separate
LFS_ASSERT for only pure expressions? This may not be worth trying to
solve outside of the compiler...
I realized the reason asserting on opened/closed file handles added so
much extra code was because our LFS_ASSERT macro doesn't properly
eliminate side-effects.
Consider this assert:
LFS_ASSERT(lfsr_opened_isopen(lfs, &dir->o));
Expanded:
((lfsr_opened_isopen(lfs, &dir->o))
? (void)0
: __builtin_unreachable());
Even though the compiler knows lfsr_opened_isopen must return true
here, it doesn't know what possible side-effects calling
lfsr_opened_isopen may have, and can't eliminate the function call.
This is quite a bit more obvious if you did something like:
LFS_ASSERT(lfsr_file_sync(&lfs, &file) == 0);
But since lfsr_opened_isopen is a static inline function, it gets a
little bit less clear. Even worse, whether or not the call is eliminated
probably depends if it's actually inlined and other compiler
optimization noise.
---
This commit effectively reverts LFS_ASSERT as a compiler hint, making
LFS_ASSERT an empty string if LFS_NO_ASSERT is defined.
This may not be the optimal solution, but it at least keeps the
programmer's intuition that anything in LFS_ASSERT has zero impact when
asserts are disabled. It would be nice if there was some way to tell the
compiler that an expression should have no side-effects, but as far as
I'm aware this is not currently possible.
Measurements show that just disabling asserts wins in both code and
stack over trying to leverage asserts-as-hints:
code stack
hint-assert (before): 33904 2584
no-assert (after): 33626 (-0.8%) 2552 (-1.2%)
At least both of these win over leaving asserts enabled, so
asserts-as-hints does eliminate _most_ code (measured here
with a simple assert-loop, since I assume that would have the smallest
code footprint):
code stack
loop-assert: 36874 2616
hint-assert (before): 33904 (-8.1%) 2584 (-1.2%)
no-assert (after): 33626 (-8.8%) 2552 (-2.4%)
Unfortunately asserts-as-hints was doing quite a bit of heavy lifting
at preventing overzealous GCC warnings. It took quite a few tweaks to
get GCC to shut up, and I'm still not entirely sure the best way to tell
GCC that some functions only return negative values. Currently I just
limit certain error checks to only check for negative values, which is
not great, but at least gets the code compiling again...
This adopts upstream opened/closed assertions, which are useful for
catching user mistakes (note the bug fixes in our tests):
- Assert if already open in lfsr_*_open
- Assert if not open in lfsr_file_* and lfsr_dir_* functions
- Assert if any files/dirs are still open in lfsr_unmount
Unfortunately this had a surprising code cost for what really should
have been a noop as far as the compiler is concerned. And saved a bit of
stack? Maybe our assertion hints are causing a surprising amount of code
movement? I'm really not sure what's going on and this deserves more
investigation:
code stack
before: 33686 2592
after: 33904 (+0.6%) 2584 (-0.3%)
At the very least this didn't add a noticable amount of testing time. I
was a bit concerned because our orphan/zombie testing grows opened-list
operations ~O(n^2), but any measurable overhead is less than how much
our test runtime swings between runs (+-~20s).
Before, lfsr_mount would return LFS_ERR_INVAL if it could not mount the
filesystem for any reason. This matches POSIX's mount behavior, but is,
in my humble opinion, unhelpful... A corrupted filesystem image is an
"invalid parameter"?
This splits lfsr_mount's failed-to-mount behavior into two error codes:
- LFS_ERR_CORRUPT - Failed to mount because something was corrupted.
Unlikely disk contains a littlefs image.
- LFS_ERR_NOTSUP - Failed to mount because on-disk filesystem is
incompatible. Reconfiguring your driver may successfully mount.
This offers a bit more of a hint to users on why mount failed. Though
relevant error logs will probably have more useful information. Worst
case users can always treat CORRUPT/NOTSUP the same after calling
lfsr_mount.
Code changes:
code stack
before: 33674 2592
after: 33686 (+0.0%) 2592 (+0.0%)
I realized we really can't do anything if we find a file of unknown
type... If we don't understand a file's data structure, we can't really
do any bookkeeping. Allocating new blocks will probably corrupt unknown
files since we can't traverse any related B-trees, and mdir compaction
would be an absolute mess.
So, instead, just print an error and bail during mount.
Eventually we could at least fallback to readonly mode, but this is
currently a TODO item.
This also means the LFS_ERR_NOTSUP logic in lfsr_mtree_pathlookup is no
longer needed. Since, even with readonly fallback, we should never
mutate a filesystem with unknown file types.
Maybe in the future we could have a sort of known-but-not-supported mode
for file types? So special file types could not be support, but at least
understood enough to support traversal/remove/rename/etc?
Code changes:
code stack
before: 33694 2592
after: 33674 (-0.1%) 2592 (+0.0%)
Returning the actual on-disk file type is probably more useful for users
as this gives them more information.
I was originally concerned about collisions with future internal types,
LFS_TYPE_TRAVERSAL, etc, needed for internal opened-list tracking, but
it turns out we can avoid problems by starting internal types at 0x80,
since on-disk file types are only 7-bits.
Code changes:
code stack
before: 33710 2592
after: 33694 (-0.0%) 2592 (+0.0%)
This adds a couple things so our unknown file types don't just cause our
filesystem to fall over:
- lfsr_mount now prints a warning on any unknown file types found at
mount time. Since we're already iterating over all files to find
orphans, this is basically free.
- Added LFS_TYPE_UNKNOWN to represent files with an unknown/unsupported
type. This is now returned by lfsr_stat/lfsr_dir_read for files of any
unknow type.
- Added LFS_ERR_NOTSUP. This is now returned by functions that attempt
to modify a file of unknown type, and my have more use cases in the
future.
It's tempting to allow remove/rename on unknown file types, but since
we don't know what data structures these may be referencing, doing so
would likely leak storage. Or worse. Shrubs for example would just
explode if you only moved the metadata entry.
This also adds test_incompat_unknown to test these cases.
Code changes are minimal, though there are a number of extra conditions
to check for unknown file types. The lfsr_mount condition is
particularly fun as it should be completely optimized out when debug
statements are disabled:
code stack
before: 33670 2592
after: 33710 (+0.1%) 2592 (+0.0%)
Unlike the other test_compat tests, the test_incompat tests cover
specific corner cases and don't require any special linking. We probably
always want to run these, and keeping them merged with test_compat risks
the entire suite being omitted at some point.
The test_compat tests are a bit special and probably deserves a
dedicated test suite.
test_compat has been very useful for testing compatibility on patch and
minor releases.
Though, in porting the tests, I've realized these are actually really
flimsy w.r.t. API changes... lfsp_config notably relies on compatible
struct layouts, which is _not_ guaranteed by littlefs's compatibility
rules.
For this reason I've restricted these tests to only run if LFS_VERSION
doesn't change, though this may be worth reinvestigating in the future.
test_compat on minor API releases would be quite valuable...
lfsr_fs_stat is also not quite up to date with upstream yet. It's really
just a small shim copying over static configs at the moment (except for
name_limit/file_limit). This is because we're still missing most of what
would actually be interesting here: variable block counts, minor
versions, etc.
And of course a minimal lfsr_fs_stat means minimal code changes:
code stack
before: 33642 2592
after: 33670 (+0.1%) 2592 (+0.0%)
See comments/previous commits. lfsr_fs_mkconsistent allows running
internal consistency operations without any other filesystem changes.
Implementation-wize, this just calls lfsr_fs_preparemutation which we
already need to, uh, prepare for mutation. Though it may do some
additional work in the future, such as setting compat flags, version
numbers, etc.
Added mkconsistent permutations to what seems like the relevant tests:
- test_forphans - easy for lfsr_fs_mkconsistent to accidentally delete
orphans/zombies.
- test_powerloss - heavy fuzz tests over powerloss-related consistency
operations, though this does multiply every permutation by ~2x...
Code cost minimal. I guess this is what it costs to make an internal
function non-static:
code stack
before: 33634 2592
after: 33642 (+0.0%) 2592 (+0.0%)
Changed:
- lfsr_mkdir(&lfs, "/") => LFS_ERR_EXIST
- lfsr_file_open(&lfs, &file, "/", *) => LFS_ERR_ISDIR
Unchanged:
- lfsr_remove(&lfs, "/") => LFS_ERR_INVAL
- lfsr_rename(&lfs, "/", *) => LFS_ERR_INVAL
- lfsr_rename(&lfs, *, "/") => LFS_ERR_INVAL
This better matches what Linux, etc, does: prefering a normal
dir-related error unless the only issue is that the dir in question is
the root.
Though Linux, etc, usually return EBUSY, which seems to also be used for
special device files. We could add LFS_ERR_BUSY, but I'm not sure it's
really worth it for such a rare error. It's not like the name would help
anything...
Internally, lfsr_mtree_pathlookup always returns LFS_ERR_INVAL for root,
so this unfortunately requires a bit more code to map to the correct
errors:
code stack
before: 33598 2592
after 33634 (+0.1%) 2592 (+0.0%)
Turns out there's very _very_ small powerloss hole in our current
perturb logic.
We rely on tag valid bits to validate perturb bits, but these
intentionally don't end up in the commit checksum. This means there will
always be a powerloss hole when we write the last valid bit. If we lose
power after writing that bit, suddenly the remaining commit and any
following commits may appear as valid.
Now, this is really unlikely considering we need to lose power exactly
when we write the cksum tag's valid bit, and our nonce helps protect
against this. But a hole is a hole.
The solution here is to include the _current_ perturb bit (q) in the
commit's cksum tag, alongside the _next_ perturb bit (p). This will be
included in the commit's checksum, but _not_ in the canonical checksum,
allowing the commit's checksum validate the current perturb state
without ruining our erased-state agnostic checksums:
.---+---+---+---. . . .---+---+---+---. \ \ \ \
|v| tag | |v| tag | | | | |
+---+---+---+---+ +---+---+---+---+ | | | |
| commit | | commit | | | | |
| | | | +-. | | |
+---+---+---+---+ +---+---+---+---+ / | | | |
|v|qp-------------. |v|qp| tag | | . . .
+---+---+---+---+ | +---+---+---+---+ | . . .
| cksum | | | cksum | | . . .
+---+---+---+---+ | +---+---+---+---+ | . . .
| padding | | | padding | | . . .
| | | | | | . . .
+---+---+---+---+ | . +---+---+---+---+ | | | |
| erased | +-> |v------------------' | | |
| | | +---+---+---+---+ | | |
. . | | commit | +-. | +- rbyd
. . | |.----------------. | | | | cksum
| +| -+---+---+---+ | / | +-. /
+-> |v|qp| tag | '-----' | |
| +- ^ ---+---+---+ / |
'------' cksum ----------------'
+---+---+---+---+
| padding |
| |
+---+---+---+---+
| erased |
| |
. .
. .
(Ok maybe this diagram needs work...)
This adds another thing that needs to be checked during rbyd fetch, and
note, we _do_ need to explicitly check this, but it solves the problem.
If power is loss after v, q would be invalid, and if power is lost after
q, our cksum would be invalid.
Note this would have also been an issue for the previous cksum + parity
perturb scheme.
Code changes:
code stack
before: 33570 2592
after: 33598 (+0.1%) 2592 (+0.0%)
The previous cksum + parity scheme worked, but needing to calculate both
cksum + parity on slightly different sets of metadata felt overly
complicated. After taking a step back, I've realized the problem is that
we're trying to force perturb effects to be implicit via the parity. If we
instead actually implement perturb effects explicitly, things get quite
a bit simpler...
This does add a bit more logic to the read path, but I don't think it's
worse than the mess we needed to parse separate cksum + parity.
Now, the perturb bit has the explicit behavior of inverting all tag
valid bits in the following commit. Which is conveniently the same as
xoring the crc32c with 00000080 before parsing each tag:
.---+---+---+---. . . .---+---+---+---. \ \ \ \
|v| tag | |v| tag | | | | |
+---+---+---+---+ +---+---+---+---+ | | | |
| commit | | commit | | | | |
| | | | +-. | | |
+---+---+---+---+ +---+---+---+---+ / | | | |
|v|p--------------. |v|p| tag | | . . .
+---+---+---+---+ | +---+---+---+---+ | . . .
| cksum | | | cksum | | . . .
+---+---+---+---+ | +---+---+---+---+ | . . .
| padding | | | padding | | . . .
| | | | | | . . .
+---+---+---+---+ | . +---+---+---+---+ | | | |
| erased | +-> |v------------------' | | |
| | | +---+---+---+---+ | | |
. . | | commit | +-. | +- rbyd
. . | | | | | | | cksum
| +---+---+---+---+ / | +-. /
'-> |v----------------------' | |
+---+---+---+---+ / |
| cksum ----------------'
+---+---+---+---+
| padding |
| |
+---+---+---+---+
| erased |
| |
. .
. .
With this scheme, we don't need to calculate a separate parity, because
each valid bit effectively validates the current state of the perturb
bit.
We also don't need extra logic to omit valid bits from the cksum,
because flipping all valid bits effectively makes perturb=0 the
canonical metadata encoding and cksum.
---
I also considered only inverting the first valid bit, which would have
the additional benefit of allowing entire commits to be crc32ced at
once, but since we don't actually track when we've started a commit
this turned out to be quite a bit more complicated than I thought.
We need someway to validate the first valid bit, otherwise it could be
flipped by a failed prog and we'd never notice. This is fine, we can
store a copy of the previous perturb bit in the next cksum tag, but it
does mean we need to track the perturb bit for the duration of the
commit. So we'd end up needing to track both start-of-commit and the
perturb bit state, which starts getting difficult to fit into our rbyd
struct...
It's easier and simpler to just flip every valid bit. As a plus this
means every valid bit contributes to validating the perturb bit.
---
Also renamed LFSR_TAG_PERTURB -> LFSR_TAG_NOISE just to avoid confusion.
Though not sure if this tag should stick around...
The end result is a nice bit of code/stack savings, which is what we'd
expect with a simpler scheme:
code stack
before: 33746 2600
after: 33570 (-0.5%) 2592 (-0.3%)
Turns out we don't need SHRUBALLOC, as we can infer if we need to reset
the shrub based on if it already exists in our mdir. Not in mdir =>
needs to alloc/reset.
This saves an internal tag and a bit of code:
code stack
before: 33770 2600 (+0.0%)
after: 33746 (-0.1%) 2600 (+0.0%)
It's counter-intuitive, but no top-level API should return
LFS_ERR_CORRUPT. Instead, if we can't make progress because of a corrupt
block, we should return LFS_ERR_NOSPC. This makes it easier for users to
write code that is well behaved even when a device is end-of-life.
It's up to our mroot extension algorithm to make sure this case can't be
reached in normal operation unless the device is _actually_ at
end-of-life.
Because mroot extension is a bit of a special case, we weren't
converting these corrupt errors to nospc errors consistently. This is
fixed now, along with a couple more hopefully-useful logging statements.
Found while playing around with test_exhaustion + block_recycles=-1.
This should assert on bad wear-leveling, but LFS_ERR_CORRUPT was
unexpected. Added an explicit test because this is an easy thing to let
split through:
- test_badblocks_mrootanchor_wear
Code changes were surprisingly minimal, I wonder if constants are being
swapped out somewhere low-level?
code stack
before: 33766 2600
after: 33770 (+0.0%) 2600 (+0.0%)
The main test additions are the test_powerloss tests, intended to be
high-level tests over difficult/weird powerloss environments (such as
out-of-order writes!):
- test_powerloss_dir_many - 2242 pls
- test_powerloss_file_many - 8856 pls
- test_powerloss_file_pl_fuzz - 384508 pls
- test_powerloss_filedir_pl_fuzz - 268339 pls
But there was also a bunch of other test movement in the late-stage/
high-level tests. I'm trying to keep the core of these tests somewhat
consistent so we have a nice template to extend for future testing, in
case we want to test other environmentalish concerns, but not all of
these tests make sense in all of these contexts:
badblocks powerloss relocations exhaustion
dir_many y y y
dir_fuzz y y y
file_many y y y
file_fuzz y y y
fwrite_fuzz y y
orphanzombie_fuzz y y y
orphanzombiedir_fuzz y y y
file_pl_fuzz y y
filedir_pl_fuzz y y
Why not:
- dir/file_many+exhaustion? - Needs to be unbounded
- dir/file_fuzz+powerloss? - Takes O(n^2)
- fwrite_fuzz+powerloss? - Takes O(n^2)
- fwrite_fuzz+relocations? - Doesn't really test anything
- orphanzombie*_fuzz+powerloss? - Powerloss kills zombies
- file*_pl_fuzz+badblocks? - PL + Badblocks currently incompactible
- file*_pl_fuzz+exhaustion? - PL + Badblocks currently incompactible
---
Of course, in order to actually get out-of-order write testing working,
we need to implement out-of-order write syncing.
Fortunately this was a simple exercise in placing lfsr_bd_sync calls
before any mdir commits where we may have unsynced data:
- in lfsr_file_sync, to sync any pending file data
- in lfsr_mdir_commit, to sync any mroot/mtree changes
We also call lfsr_bd_sync _after_ mdir commits in case users expect to
sequence any filesystem-external operations such as network, UI, etc. In
theory this could be optional, but no users have really requested it
yet, so leave that for a potential future improvement:
- in lfsr_mdir_commit
- in lfsr_formatinited (really just because we don't go through
lfsr_mdir_commit)
Note that lfsr_rbyd_commit has been relaxed in the scheme. It only
flushes caches, and does _not_ call lfsr_bd_sync. This is useful for
allowing multiple B-tree nodes to be written out-of-order, also long as
the whole thing is synchronized before any mdir commit.
All of these lfsr_bd_sync calls add a bit of code, but not really an
amount to care about:
code stack
before: 33678 2600
after: 33766 (+0.3%) 2600 (+0.0%)
This sort of reverts the addition of lfsr_bd_unprog, but with a slightly
better API. lfsr_bd_unprog was too much of a hack, and isn't really
generalizable. The align flag isn't necessarily any better, but at least
it's the simplest/least-confusing solution available.
And it's net savings, code-wise:
code stack lfs_t
before: 33690 2608 164
after: 33678 (-0.0%) 2600 (-0.3%) 160 (-2.4%)
The only real use case for the bd runtime bounds checks is to abort rbyd
commits when they run off the end of the block. Since rbyd's now have
their own set of low-level append functions, we're better off doing the
bounds checks there and changing all of the lfsr_bd_* bounds checks to
asserts.
Block overflows are a particularly easy mistake to make, and one that
would be good to catch early.
One interesting thing to note: We're now using LFSR_TAG_DSIZE for range
checks instead of the actual tag encoding. This may seem suboptimal, but
if LFSR_TAG_DSIZE can't fit in the remaining space in the block, the
cksum tag wouldn't be able to fit anyways. So we're not really wasting
any space.
This saves a nice bit of code:
code stack
before: 33690 2608
after: 33610 (-0.2%) 2608 (+0.0%)
While exploring the test_badblocks ERASENOOP failure more, I realized
the problem is that we are nesting crc32cs.
To be clear, using crc32cs to validate progs in general is not an issue,
that is perfectly fine on paper. The issue is that we were using crc32cs
to validate progs _that contain crc32cs_.
Looking at the collision, we can see the fully expanded lleb128s we use
for our cksum tags:
00 00 00 ff b0 02 00 87 80 80 00 3e c0 7f 7e => bdfa9b10
ab 77 de c2 b0 03 00 87 80 80 00 3e 38 d5 22 => bdfa9b10
'-.-' ^ '----.----' '----.----'
'----|------|-----------|-- cksum tag
'------|-----------|-- cksum weight (0)
'-----------|-- cksum size + padding
'-- cksum crc32c
So we ended up perfectly aligning the cksum's crc32c with our cache
line. Lucky us.
Unfortunately funny math makes it so that whenever a crc32c contains a
crc32c, the inner crc32c sort of cancels itself out from the outer
crc32c. So these two messages end up mathematically equivalent, even
though they contain different data:
crc(m) = m(x) x^|P|-1 mod P
crc(m ++ crc(m)) = (m(x) x^|P|-1 + (m(x) x^|P|-1 mod P)) x^|P|-1 mod P
crc(m ++ crc(m)) = (m(x) x^|P|-1 + m(x) x^|P|-1) x^|P|-1 mod P
crc(m ++ crc(m)) = 0 x^|P|-1 mod P
crc(m ++ crc(m)) = 0
So using a crc32c to check progs is not fit for purpose.
This leaves us with a couple options:
1. Use a different checksum, or do something like rearranging bytes to
avoid this cancelling out issue. Unfortunately this gets tricky since
crc32cs are linear, simply using an xor mask won't work...
2. Don't check progs at such a low-level, but at a high-level using the
rbyd/data block crc32cs. Since this would mean only one crc32c, this
would avoid nesting issues. Unfortunately this would probably come
with quite a high code cost to try to keep track of both the
before+after rbyd cksums everywhere...
3. Just read back the data into the rcache to compare at the byte-level,
which would mean clobbering our rcache when prog checking is enabled.
This commit goes with option 3., which is probably the simplest. It also
removes any question of crc32c collision, which could be a real nuisance
when debugging low-level block device operations, a use case where prog
checking will hopefully be quite valuable.
Clobbering the rcache also has the advantage of reverting the prog
>= read requirement, which is nice for flexibility. Though this needs to
be tested.
---
There was a bit of a hiccup, and that was how prog checking interacts
with lfsr_bd_cpy. lfsr_bd_cpy used the rcache to hold data being copied
to/from disk, but this data needs to be checked, and prog checking would
clobber the rcache. Problems! I guess this is one footgun of the
internal lfsr_bd_readnext API...
The solution is to instead turn this around and use the pcache to hold
any copied data, since this would not be clobbered when prog checking.
This has some other knock-on effects, mainly that we can't take
advantage of read hints in lfsr_bd_cpy, but has the added advantage of
potentially not clobbering the rcache at all when no checking progs.
Code changes were fairly minimal:
code stack
before: 33718 2608
after: 33690 (-0.1%) 2608 (+0.0%)
The initial goal was the simplify these layers. Keyword being initial.
Unfortunately these layers are both complex and subtle, so the goal
shifted more to be rigorous and reliable.
This mainly meant rearranging our prog/read loops to follow a consistent
style, with higher-priority buffers being sorted out before flushing
things. This gets a bit tricky with wanting to support both cache
bypassing and buffer-lending prognext/readnext, but with some redundant
prognext/readnext calls it's doable.
We also now aggressively discard rcaches on pcache conflicts. This
change does rely on the prog >= read assumption. Discarding rcaches
means we should no longer have overlapping caches, so hopefully no more
zombie rcache issues.
Our bypassing heuristic was also tweaked a bit. Now, in addition to
alignment, >= read/prog_size, and >= hint requirements, we also require
operations to be >= r/pcache_size. This should improve cache usage when
r/pcache_size >> read/prog_size, since we were too eager to bypass
before.
Long story short, this ended up being more just things shifting around
than a significant simplification of the bd layers. At least we ended up
with a nice bit of stack savings:
code stack
before: 33682 2640
after: 33718 (+0.1%) 2608 (-1.2%)
Also, test_badblocks with LFS_EMUBD_BADBLOCK_ERASENOOP is now failing. I
was worried the amount of fuzz testing we do would eventually end up
with a naturally occuring crc32c collision, and sure enough we did! Yayy
yyyy...
00 00 00 ff b0 02 00 87 80 80 00 3e c0 7f 7e => bdfa9b10
ab 77 de c2 b0 03 00 87 80 80 00 3e 38 d5 22 => bdfa9b10
Need to think about what to do with this... For now I've just commented
out the problematic test.
This configuration option enables the previous behavior of reading back
every prog to check that the data was written correctly.
Unfortunately, this brings a bit of baggage, thanks to our cache
interactions being more complicated now:
- We really want to reuse the rcache for prog validation, despite the
cache performance implications. Unfortunately, we simply can't, thanks
to the new bd utility functions tying up the rcache. lfsr_bd_cpy, for
example, does not expect rcache to be invalidated between a read and
prog, and if it is, things break (I may or may not have found this by
experience).
These bd utilities are valuable, so we really need some other way to
validate our progs.
- Since we can't rely on the rcache, this leaves checksumming as the
only option for validating progs. Checksumming isn't perfect, as there
is a decent chance of false negatives, but to be honest it's probably
good enough for anything that's not malicious.
- This also adds the new constraint that we need to be able to read back
any prog into the pcache, which implies read_size <= prog_size. This
constraint didn't exist when we could clobber our rcache, but this is
not worth throwing away the new bd utilities. Not to mention
clobbering our rcache could hurt cache performance.
Why not make read_size <= prog_size conditional on check_progs?
The main reason is convenience. One very compelling use case for
check_progs is to help debug unknown filesystem/integration failures,
buf if you can't enable check_progs without changing the filesystem
configuration, you can't really rely on check_progs for debugging.
This helps future proof what we expect from block devices, in case
future error detection/correction mechanisms can benefit from our
prog_size always being readable.
Code changes were not that significant, however there was a surprising
stack cost. This seems to be because lfsr_bd_read__ can now be called
from multiple places, causing it to no longer be inlined in
lfsr_bd_read_, costing a bit of stack for the additional function call:
before: 33566 2624
after: 33682 (+0.3%) 2640 (+0.6%)
These tests provide a litmus test for if wear-leveling is working:
- test_relocations_wl_dir_fuzz
- test_relocations_wl_file_fuzz
- test_relocations_wl_orphanzombie_fuzz
- test_relocations_wl_orphanzombiedir_fuzz
We can't test the uniformity of wear, because we only implement static
wear-leveling, but what we can test is that doubling the size of storage
results in roughly doubling the lifetime of the storage.
I did try to implement some wear-leveling tests under powerloss, this
has some promise storing the current run/state on disk, but gave up
after realizing the way our linear powerloss heuristic works would
interfere with the assumption that both runs run in identical
environments...
---
Suprisingly enough, all of this fuzz testing did find another bug! We
were returning LFS_ERR_CORRUPT instead of LFS_ERR_NOSPC if
overcompaction failed to erase/prog the revision count. This is very
hard to hit, only being reachable if a block goes bad on the same erase
cycle an mdir's recycle counter overflows, and if there are no more
blocks in our filesystem, triggering overcompaction.
Difficult to hit bug, but easy fix. Just a tiny bit of extra code:
code stack
before: 33550 2624
after: 33566 2624
I guess these wear-leveling tests are also doubling as aggressive
LFS_ERR_NOSPC exhaustion tests...
Our B-trees lazily allocate their root blocks, so it makes more sense
for this to be a macro. Added/adopted a similar LFSR_SHRUB_NULL for
consistency.
Unfortunately this added a bit of code. I think because GCC struggles to
optimize compound literals, which both LFSR_BTREE_NULL and
LFSR_SHRUB_NULL expand into:
code stack
before: 33538 2624
after: 33550 (+0.0%) 2624 (+0.0%)
This replaces any remaining calls to lfsr_rbyd_appendattrs+appendcksum
with lfsr_rbyd_commit. At one point lfsr_rbyd_commit did a bit more
related to error recover, but these are equivalent now.
Because of the added complexity of bad prog alloc loops, reducing the
number of function calls in these cases is increasingly enticing.
This saves some code, and a surprising amount of stack!
code stack
before: 33618 2648
after: 33538 (-0.2%) 2624 (-0.9%)
This (re)implements the heavy-hitting tests in test_badblocks that rakes
filesystem operations over various types of prog/erase failures:
- test_badblocks_[one|region|alternating]_btree - force tall B-trees
- test_badblocks_[one|region|alternating]_dirs - large mtree
- test_badblocks_[one|region|alternating]_files - mixed mtree + files
- test_badblocks_[one|region|alternating]_fwrite_fuzz - complex files
- test_badblocks_[one|region|alternating]_orphanzombiedir_fuzz - complex
- test_badblocks_mrootanchor - uh, format fails, cheap test though
Where:
- test_badblocks_one_* - runs with every possible bad block
- test_badblocks_region_* - runs with a large region of bad blocks
- test_badblocks_alternating_* - runs with alternating bad blocks, this
one is rough for block pair allocations
This required quite a bit of rewiring of internal block allocations. I
knew this would eventually need to be (re)implemented, but the jump from
infallible to fallible progs everywhere was still quite involved:
- lfs_alloc no longer returns LFS_ERR_CORRUPT if erase fails, instead it
will keep searching for a block where an erase "sticks" or return
LFS_ERR_NOENT. This simplifies above layers.
This actually turned out to be required since the lookahead traversal
can also return LFS_ERR_CORRUPT... which needs to be treated as a hard
error and bail.
- In lfsr_btree_commit_ all inner-node compactions needed alloc loops.
This really complements B-tree's copy-on-write behavior, but does make
lfsr_btree_commit_ a bit of a goto soup...
- Same for lfsr_btree_commit/lfsr_bshrub_commit, but fortunately there
are nice and self-contained.
- lfsr_mdir_alloc__/lfsr_mdir_swap__ needed a bit of an overhaul to be
able to handle bad progs. lfsr_mdir_alloc__ now takes a bool `all`
parameter to know if it should allocate one or two of the mdir blocks.
You could argue it's simpler/cheaper to always allocate two blocks at
a time, but this could lead to premature filesystem death on
unfortunate bad block patterns. test_badblocks_alternating_*
specifically tests for this. Note we still allocate both on
relocation, but only on the first commit attempt.
This also rearranges things to move the overcompacting logic out of
lfsr_mdir_swap__ and into lfsr_mdir_commit_, since we only want to
overcompact after trying to program all possible free blocks.
- lfsr_file_flush_ now needs to rewrite the entire block of data if a
prog fails, even if appending an existing data block.
Humorously, this was really easy, since we already align everything to
any existing blocks as a part of our crystallization algorithm. Almost
too easy... (no new code! only a couple gotos! scary!)
Note some of these may be transformable into simpler while loops, but I
decided to avoid this and prefer explicit `relocate` gotos because: 1.
in some functions these end up deeply nested in existing loops and I was
already bitten by a shadowed continue, 2. the "good" path does not loop,
with a loop you need an easy to miss break and the intention is less
clear, and 3. consistency is good.
We are _not_ testing read errors yet. This is because we no longer read
back progs and the relaxed rcache/pcache alignment requirements make
this a bit difficult to (re)implement. User feedback also suggests we
may want to make this optional... So need to think on how to address
this.
Some other notes:
- Our low-level bd wrappers, lfsr_bd_*__, now log bad ops via LFS_DEBUG.
- Overcompaction is now an LFS_WARN.
- The pcache is now correctly dropped if we error during flush.
- I noticed lfsr_btree_alloc double allocated for new B-trees, it
doesn't now, maybe change this function?
- Our B-tree tests all stop on LFS_ERR_NOSPC, but this isn't guaranteed
since our filesystem isn't in a valid state. We should make sure none
of our B-tree tests actually rely on this...
Honestly, considering how much new logic was introduced, this really did
not impact code cost as much as I thought it would. Probably thanks to
the underlying data structures being built to easily discard blocks in
the first place:
code stack
before: 33474 2640
after: 33618 (+0.4%) 2648 (+0.3%)
This should allow mdir commits that would normally trigger a relocation
to continue if lfsr_mdir_alloc__ return LFS_ERR_NOSPC, though at least
with a logged warning.
This seems preferable to the alternative: locking up the filesystem.
Though this doesn't have tests yet, so take it with a grain of salt...
Code changes minimal:
code stack
before: 33470 2640
after: 33474 (+0.0%) 2640 (+0.0%)
We were unconditionally xoring our prng seed with mdir_[0]'s cksum, but
we should really use mdelta to xor in the relevant cksums.
This is a little bit more complicated, so adds a little bit of code:
code stack
before: 33442 2640
after: 33470 (+0.1%) 2640 (+0.0%)
The mleafweight naming is... not great...
Renaming mleaf_bits -> mdir_bits and replacing mleafweight with explicit
shifts of 1 << mdir_bits seems to get the job done without introducing a
new and potentially confusing name.
This was a lesson learned from recycle_bits. Sometimes more helpers just
makes code less, not more, readable.
In theory int should always be the fastest type for simple loops.
No idea why this cost 4-bytes. Looking at the dissassembly, the int
version seems to write to the stack more often? The revision count
logic doesn't change at all... Compiler noise?
code stack
before: 33438 2640
after: 33442 (+0.0%) 2640 (+0.0%)
I think this fits a bit better with the new ordering requirement for
mdir splits.
I also explored the same transformation in lfsr_btree_commit_, but
decided against it for two reasons:
1. It saves roughly the same amount of code, but increases the RAM cost,
probably due to decreased flexibility on where/when to allocate the
structs. lfsr_btree_commit_ is and likely always will be on the stack
hot-path, so this is a bit important.
2. The naming may be confusing. Unlike in lfsr_mdir_commit, sibling in
lfsr_btree_commit_ serves multiple roles, including the previous
sibling for btree merges. I imagine renaming sibling -> rbyd_[1]
would make that whole sequence quite difficult to read...
At least in lfsr_mdir_commit this saves a bit a code:
code stack
before: 33482 2640
+btree: 33398 (-0.3%) 2664 (+0.9%)
after: 33438 (-0.1%) 2640 (+0.0%)
Good news! test_wl_orphanzombie_fuzz found a rare and difficult to reach
bug. Bad news, it found the bug only after changing littlefs's initial
revision count, which is about as unrelated a change as you can possibly
have...
Oh well, at least now we can add specialized tests targeting this (and
push them to hopefully cover anything similar):
- test_files_mv_split
- test_files_mv_split_backwards
- test_forphans_rename_split
- test_forphans_rename_split_backwards
The bug occurs when a rename of a file to/from the same mdir triggers an
mdir split, and you have that file opened, and the opened file handle
tracks a bshrub or bsprout. Oh, and if that wasn't unlikely enough, this
only breaks when the rename crosses from the new-right-sibling to the
new-left-sibling (inverse order of mdir split compacts), left-to-right
is fine.
The problem is how we stage bshrubs/bsprouts. bshrubs/bsprouts are a bit
tricky in that several unrelated operations can change their location,
sometimes multiple times in the same lfsr_mdir_commit call:
- mdir compaction - move bshrub/bsprout to new mdir
- bshrub commit - append a new shrub trunk
- rename commit - move bshrub/bsprout to a new mdir/mid
To keep track of all of this, lfsr_file_t has a dedicated field,
file.bshrub_, that holds the bshrub/bsprout's new location during
lfsr_mdir_commit. This may be changed multiple times, but the last
change wins.
This works as long as changes occur in an expected order. Importantly,
commits that change the bshrub, such as rename, need to play out after
compactions.
It turns out this is violated when splitting an mdir.
Because we have single pcache, we need to write out the entire compact +
commit of each mdir at a time. When we split, we arbitrarily do this
left-to-right, which results in left commits being played out before
right compactions.
Here's how things play out when we rename right-to-left:
1. commit rename -> bshrub = src mid, orig mdir
2. commit fails because of ERANGE
3. compact left mdir -> bshrub = src mid, left mdir
4. commit left mdir -> bshrub = dst mid, left mdir
5. compact right mdir -> bshrub = src mid, right mdir
6. commit right mdir (skips rename)
Oh no! Our staged bshrub ends up with the wrong location.
---
This is quite tricky to solve. We can't just play out the rename again
on the right mdir, because we've already lost the new bshrub trunk at
this point. Other solutions involving the grm or extra "moved" flags get
messy because, well, lfsr_mdir_commit's internals are quite messy.
The solution here, which is a bit hacky, but also obnoxiously elegant in
a way, is to reorder the split mdir compactions such that the new mdir
containing the commit mid is always compacted last. The means any
related attrs are played out after both compactions, allowing renames to
resolve correctly:
1. commit rename -> bshrub = src mid, orig mdir
2. commit fails because of ERANGE
3. right mdir contains mid
4. compact right mdir -> bshrub = src mid, right mdir
5. commit right mdir (skips rename)
6. compact left mdir -> bshrub = src mid, left mdir
7. commit left mdir -> bshrub = dst mid, left mdir
This only works as long as such commits only span a single mid, though
we already rely on mdir commits being single-mid elsewhere, so maybe
this won't be a problem?
The only real remaining concern is how much complexity this adds to
lfsr_mdir_commit. And while this feels logically messy, the resulting
code cost is surprisingly little:
code stack
before: 33458 2640
after: 33482 (+0.1%) 2640 (+0.0%)
Still, I'll have to scratch my head to see if there's a better way to
solve this...
The main reason is just to avoid using 0x00000000 as the initial
revision count. The is currently the default for B-tree rbyds, and
accidentally writing a B-tree rbyd to an mroot block is both easy
(misconfigured block_count) and something we really want to notice when
debugging.
Fortunately we can still keep our sequence comparison test (0 > -1) by
only setting the top-bits. Though we still need to zero the recycle
counter to avoid premature mroot extension, so this magic number may not
stay intact depending on configuration.
This does add a bit of code, probably to load the magic number from
Thumb's constant pools, but I think it's worth it:
code stack
before: 33430 2640
after: 33458 (+0.1%) 2640 (+0.0%)
This makes a bit more sense with the new block_recycles name.
block_recycles=0 (previously block_recycles=1) requires 1 erase, but it
doesn't really "recycle" the block. With this change, block_recycles=1
"recycles" the block once (2 erases in total) before relocating, which I
think is a bit more intuitive.
Note, this sort of messes with our power-of-2 rounding, as the
block_recycles is technically rounded down to the nearest power-of-2
after adding 1:
- block_recycles=1022 -> 512 erases
- block_recycles=1023 -> 1024 erases
- block_recycles=1024 -> 1024 erases
- block_recycles=1025 -> 1024 erases
But I'm going to keep the block_recycles description more-or-less as is
for now, as I think this extra detail is more confusing than useful,
powers-of-2 stay powers-of-2, and the <=block_recycles contraint is not
violated.
test_wl is intended to test wear-leveling, although right now that just
involves heavy-duty fuzz tests with extremely low block_recycles.
What may be more interesting is the addition of aggressive orphan/zombie
tests:
- test_forphans_orphanzombie_fuzz
- test_forphans_orphanzombiedir_fuzz
- test_wl_orphanzombie_fuzz
- test_wl_orphanzombiedir_fuzz
These tests mix random file/dir operations while keeping random file
handles open, creating a complex environment for hitting weird orphan/
zombie corner cases.
And they did find a bug! We were asserting on LFS_ERR_RANGE when
migrating shrubs/sprouts during lfsr_mdir_commit__. The tricky thing
about lfsr_mdir_commit__ is that we need to expect LFS_ERR_RANGE from
any append operations, since this is what trigger mdir compaction. This
is especially tricky since LFS_ERR_RANGE is a hard error in most other
functions.
Easy fix. lfsr_mdir_commit__ contains no more LFS_ERR_RANGE asserts.
With these tests hopefully that's the last time we see this mistake.
The original goal here was to restore all of the revision count/
wear-leveling features that were intentionally ignored during
refactoring, but over time a few other ideas to better leverage our
revision count bits crept in, so this is sort of the amalgamation of
that...
Note! None of these changes affect reading. mdir fetch strictly needs
only to look at the revision count as a big 32-bit counter to determine
which block is the most recent.
The interesting thing about the original definition of the revision
count, a simple 32-bit counter, is that it actually only needs 2-bits to
work. Well, three states really: 1. most recent, 2. less recent, 3.
future most recent. This means the remaining bits are sort of up for
grabs to other things.
Previously, we've used the extra revision count bits as a heuristic for
wear-leveling. Here we reintroduce that, a bit more rigorously, while
also carving out space for a nonce to help with commit collisions.
Here's the new revision count breakdown:
vvvvrrrr rrrrrrnn nnnnnnnn nnnnnnnn
'-.''----.----''---------.--------'
'------|---------------|---------- 4-bit relocation revision
'---------------|---------- recycle-bits recycle counter
'---------- pseudorandom nonce
- 4-bit relocation revision
We technically only need 2-bits to tell which block is the most
recent, but I've bumped it up to 4-bits just to be safe and to make
it a bit more readable in hex form.
- recycle-bits recycle counter
A user configurable counter, this counter tracks how many times a
metadata block has been erased. When it overflows we return the block
to the allocator to participate in block-level wear-leveling again.
This implements our copy-on-bounded-write strategy.
- pseudorandom nonce
The remaining bits we fill with a pseudorandom nonce derived from the
filesystem's prng. Note this prng isn't the greatest (it's just the
xor of all mdir cksums), but it gets the job done. It should also be
reproducible, which can be a good thing.
Suggested by ithinuel, the addition of a nonce should help with the
commit collision issue caused by noop erases. It doesn't completely
solve things, since we're only using crc32c cksums not collision
resistant cryptographic hashes, but we still have the existing
valid/perturb bit system to fall back on.
When we allocate a new mdir, we want to zero the recycle counter. This
is where our relocation revision is useful for indicating which block is
the most recent:
initial state: 10101010 10101010 10101010 10101010
'-.'
+1 zero random
v .----'----..---------'--------.
lfsr_rev_init: 10110000 00000011 01110010 11101111
When we increment, we increment recycle counter and xor in a new nonce:
initial state: 10110000 00000011 01110010 11101111
'--------.----''---------.--------'
+1 xor <-- random
v v
lfsr_rev_init: 10110000 00000111 01010100 01000000
And when the recycle counter overflows, we relocate the mdir.
If we aren't wear-leveling, we just increment the relocation revision to
maximize the nonce.
---
Some other notes:
- Renamed block_cycles -> block_recycles.
This is intended to help avoid confusing block_cycles with the actual
physical number of erase cycles supported by the device.
I've noticed this happening a few times, and it's unfortunately
equivalent to disabling wear-leveling completely. This can be improved
with better documentation, but also changing the name doesn't hurt.
- We now relocate both blocks in the mdir at the same time.
Previously we only relocated one block in the mdir per recycle. This
was necessary to keep our threaded linked-list in sync, but the
threaded linked-list is now no more!
Relocating both blocks is simpler, updates the mtree less often,
compatible with metadata redundancy, and avoids aliasing issues that
were a problem when relocating one block.
Note that block_recycles is internally multiplied by 2 so each block
sees the correct number of erase cycles.
- block_recycles is now rounded down to a power-of-2.
This makes the counter logic easier to work with and takes up less RAM
in lfs_t. This is a rough heuristic anyways.
- Moved the lfs->seed updates into lfsr_mountinited + lfsr_mdir_commit.
This avoids readonly operations affecting the seed and should help
reproducibility.
- Changed rev count in dbg scripts to render as hex, similar to cksums.
Now that we using most of the bits in the revision count, the decimal
version is, uh, not helpful...
Code changes:
code stack
before: 33342 2640
after: 33434 (+0.3%) 2640 (+0.0%)
Added:
name builtin? string.h?
lfs_memcmp y y
lfs_memcpy y y
lfs_memmove y y
lfs_memset y y
lfs_memchr y
lfs_memcchr (I wish!)
lfs_memxor
lfs_strlen y
lfs_strcmp y
lfs_strcpy y
lfs_strchr y
lfs_strcchr
lfs_strspn y
lfs_strcspn y
The intention of these is _not_ to try anything better than the stdlib,
but to allow users/integrators to override these functions if string.h
or stdlib.h is not available.
Well... The original motivation was just to add lfs_memcchr to
lfs_utils.h, which is useful for checking if a memory is all zeros, but
then things got a bit out of hand... Oh well, flexibility is good right?
Things get a bit... delicate wrapping memcmp/memcpy/memmove/memset like
this. These functions are basically primitives in C, and the compiler
can get up to all sort of tricks eliding/folding these. Unfortunately,
even just wrapping these in static inline functions seems to create
problems, so I've just defaulted to #defining the relevant lfs_*
symbols.
Even weirder, GCC's __builtin_* variants seem to be worse, code-wise,
than the stdlib symbols. Maybe because these ignore -Os hints? For this
reason I've prioritized the string.h's symbols unless LFS_NO_STRINGH is
defined:
code stack
before: 33338 2640
static-inline: 33422 (+0.3%) 2648 (+0.3%)
builtins: 33402 (+0.2%) 2640 (+0.0%)
after: 33342 (+0.0%) 2640 (+0.0%)
Comparing the LFS_NO_STRINGH and LFS_NO_INTRINSICS builds, just for
curiosity:
code stack
default: 33342 2640
no-string.h: 33486 (+0.4%) 2640 (+0.0%)
no-intrinsics: 33514 (+0.5%) 2616 (-0.9%)
no-both: 33722 (+1.1%) 2624 (-0.6%)
The extra 4 bytes introduced seem to come from the added
lfs_gdelta_xor -> lfs_memxor indirection, not really sure why, maybe
compiler/instruction alignment noise?
Why not provide __builtin_* variants for all string.h symbols? To be
honest, because we really don't care about the performance of strlen/
strcpy/strspn in littlefs. And in environments where string.h is not
available it's likely __builtin_str* won't be as well.
Note the test/bench frameworks should stick with the stdlib symbols. By
default C code should assume these are always available, and this makes
it slightly more reliable to test with -DLFS_NO_STRINGH or
-DLFS_NO_INTRINSICS.
The main change is moving away from applying gstate changes via special
attrs. Instead, gstate changes are applied implicitly, whenever the
relevant field in lfs_t differs from the gstate on-disk.
How do we recover from errors then? Well, we already need to track the
exact on-disk encoding of any gstate (grm_p) to avoid issues with minor
encoding differences, so if we encounter an error, we can revert any
changes to gstate by re-decoding the on-disk gstate. This is more
fragile: 1. all error paths in lfsr_mdir_commit need to revert gstate,
2. logic must not error between gstate updates and lfsr_mdir_commit, but
it gets the job done.
The benefit of this approach is that it's much easier to manipulate
gstate inside of lfsr_mdir_commit. No more hacky attr-list scanning to
patch grms mid-commit! It also in theory saves stack usage by dropping
an attr, but none of these attrs were on our stack hot-path.
Other gstate changes:
- Moved all grm adjustments into lfsr_mdir_commit.
This should deduplicate the messy grm adjust logic and make grms
easier to work with.
One hiccup though is the temporarily self-removing bookmark created in
lfsr_mkdir, which needs to create a grm referencing an mid that
doesn't exist yet. To work around this, lfsr_mdir_commit now
automatically creates grms for new bookmarks.
This might be a problem if we ever elide same-mdir mkdirs, but if so
we can solve that problem then.
- Dropped lfsr_data_t xoring, the added complexity wasn't really worth
it since all gstate should be small enough to buffer on the stack.
- Renamed several things:
- lfsr_grm_push/poprm -> lfsr_grm_push/pop
- lfsr_grm_isrm -> lfsr_grm_ispending
- grm_g -> grm_p
- grm.rms -> grm.mids
- Moved things around so grm/gstate logic is grouped together.
Unfortunately none of these attrs were on our stack hot-path, so no
stack savings. But thanks to the simpler logic, this does save quite a
bit of code:
code stack
before: 33514 2632
after: 33338 (+0.5%) 2640 (+0.3%)
- cat_count < 0 => single in-RAM buffer
- cat_count >= 0 => multiple concatenated datas
Note that cat_count=0 has the same effect whether or not you interpret
the cat as single or multiple datas.
Unlike, say, lfsr_data_t's size, the cat count does not mean the same
thing in both modes, so it doesn't really make sense to operate on the
count with bits masked off. This makes cat_count more like the signed
size/err union we use often.
The hope was better code generation for single/multiple cat checks. I
noticed some questionable code generation around checking the uint16_t's
sign bit and realized this might be a bit messy on 32-bit thumb. Sign
extension is in theory more common/cheaper on 32-bit ISAs, but I don't
know if the results are really conclusive:
before: 33538 2632
after: 33514 (-0.1%) 2632 (+0.0%)
So for example:
file->m.mdir.mid => file->o.mdir.mid
We already use "o" in opened-list iterations, so this is a bit more
consistent. And it doesn't increase the already obnoxious
file->o.mdir.rbyd.blocks[0] field names...
Now that lfsr_dir_t contains a single lfsr_opened_t, it makes sense for
lfsr_opened_t to always come first in lfsr_dir_t/lfsr_file_t for
consistency.
This also allows cheaper lfsr_file_t <-> lfsr_opened_t casts (noops),
which saves a bit of code:
code stack
before: 33582 2632
after: 33538 (-0.1%) 2632 (+0.0%)
This simplification comes from the observation that we don't actually
need to know the bookmark's mid to know if a given operation is in a
dir's range, just the dir's did. And since dids are immutable, we don't
need another opened-list entry or other shenanigans.
A dir's did is a bit harder to access, requiring a name lookup, but we
conveniently already fetch these in all relevant functions as a part of
path resolution.
This does mean more opened-list logic in the high-level functions:
function can zombie can create can remove
lfsr_mkdir y y n
lfsr_rename y y y
lfsr_remove y n y
lfsr_file_opencfg y y n
But I think this actually results in better code readability, since the
opened-list logic and high-level logic are closely related. I went ahead
and lifted the similar orphan/zombie opened-list logic up to this level
for this reason.
Unfortunately lifting this logic does result in a higher code cost, but
I think this is worth it for better readability and a significantly
reduced RAM cost for lfsr_dir_ts. Keep in mind these will probably
become very common for the future planned openat/*at functions:
code stack lfsr_dir_t
before: 33402 2632 80
after: 33582 (+0.5%) 2632 (+0.0%) 44 (-45.0%)
Also added a new test case, test_dread_read_rm_remkdir, to catch the
mistake of thinking the did is unique even when the dir is removed,
since that is now a concern.