To allow relaxing when LFS3_I_REPOPLOOKAHEAD and LFS3_I_REPOPGBMAP will
be set, potentially reducing gc workload after allocating only a couple
blocks.
The relevant cfg comments have quite a bit more info.
Note -1 (not the default, 0, maybe we should explicitly flip this?)
restores the previous functionality of setting these flags on the first
block allocation.
---
Also tweaked gbmap repops during gc/traversals to _not_ try to repop
unless LFS3_I_REPOPGBMAP is set. We probably should have done this from
the beginning since repopulating the gbmap writes to disk and is
potentially destructive.
Adds code, though hopefully we can claw this back with future config
rework:
code stack ctx
before: 37176 2352 684
after: 37208 (+0.1%) 2352 (+0.0%) 688 (+0.6%)
code stack ctx
gbmap before: 40024 2368 848
gbmap after: 40120 (+0.2%) 2368 (+0.0%) 856 (+0.9%)
This is an alias for all possible gc work, which is a bit more
complicated than you might think due to compile-time features (example:
LFS3_GC_REPOPGBMAP).
The intention is to make loops like the following easy to write:
struct lfs3_fsinfo fsinfo;
lfs3_fs_stat(&lfs3, &fsinfo) => 0;
lfs3_trv_t trv;
lfs3_trv_open(&lfs3, &trv, fsinfo.flags & LFS3_GC_ALL) => 0;
...
It's possible to do this by explicitly setting all gc flags, but that
requires quite a bit of knowledge from the user.
Another option is allowing -1 for gc/traversal flags, but that loses
assert protection against unknown/misplaced flags.
---
This raises more questions about the prefix naming: it feels a bit weird
to take LFS3_I_* flags, mask with LFS3_GC_* flags, and pass them as
LFS3_T_* flags, but it gets the job done.
Limiting LFS3_GC_ALL to the LFS3_GC_* namespace avoids issues with
opt-out/mode flags such as LFS3_T_RDONLY, LFS3_T_MTREEONLY, etc. For
this reason it probably doesn't make sense to add something similar to
the other namespaces.
- LFS3_T_COMPACT -> LFS3_T_COMPACTMETA
- gc_compact_thresh -> gc_compactmeta_thresh
And friends:
LFS3_M_COMPACTMETA 0x00000800 Compact metadata logs
LFS3_GC_COMPACTMETA 0x00000800 Compact metadata logs
LFS3_I_COMPACTMETA 0x00000800 Filesystem may have uncompacted metadata
LFS3_T_COMPACTMETA 0x00000800 Compact metadata logs
---
This does two things:
1. Highlights that LFS3_T_COMPACTMETA only interacts with metadata logs,
and has no effect on data blocks.
2. Better matches the verb+noun names used for other gc/traversal flags
(REPOPGBMAP, CKMETA, etc).
It is a bit more of a mouthful, but I'm not sure that's entirely a bad
thing. These are pretty low-level flags.
There's a strong argument for naming this inline_size as that's more
likely what users expect, but shrub_size is just the more correct name
and avoids confusion around having multiple names for the same thing.
It also highlights that shrubs in littlefs3 are a bit different than
inline files in littlefs2, and that this config also affects large files
with a shrubbed root.
May rerevert this in the future, but probably only if there is
significant user confusion.
And tweaked a few related comments.
I'm still on the fence with this name, I don't think it's great, but it
at least betters describes the "repopulation" operation than
"rebuilding". The important distinction is that we don't throw away
information. Bad/erased block info (future) is still carried over into
the new gbmap snapshot, and persists unless you explicitly call
rmgbmap + mkgbmap.
So, adopting gbmap_repop_thresh for now to see if it's just a habit
thing, but may adopt a different name in the future.
As a plus, gbmap_repop_thresh is two characters shorter.
I think a good rule of thumb is if you refer to some variable/config/
field with a different name in comments/writing/etc more often than not,
you should just rename the variable/config/field to match.
So yeah, gbmap_rebuild_thresh controls when the gbmap is rebuilt.
Also touched up the doc comment a bit.
Having gbmap/bmap used in different places for the same thing was
confusing. Preferring gbmap as it is consistent with other gstate (grm
queue, gcksums), even if it is a bit noisy.
It's interesting to note what didn't change:
- The BM* range tags: LFS3_TAG_BMFREE, etc. These already differs from
the GBMAP* prefix enough, and adopting GBM* would risk confusion for
actual gstate.
- The gbmap revdbg string: "bb~r". We don't have enough characters for
anything else!
- dbgbmap.py/dbgbmapsvg.py. These aren't actually related to the gbmap,
so the name difference is a good thing.
For some reason emubd had both a path argument to lfs3_emubd_create, and
a disk_path config option, with only the disk_path actually being used.
But the real curiosity is why did GCC only starting warning about it
when copied to kiwibd? path is clearly unused in lfs3_emubd_createcfg,
but no warning...
---
Anyways, not sure which one is a better API, but we definitely don't
need two APIs, so eeny meeny miny moe...
Went ahead and chose the lfs3_emubd_create path param for some
consistency with filebd.
Long story short: %zd != %jd!
This was a simple oversight when writing the bench printing code, and
easy to miss on x86_64 and other modern PCs, but the mistake becomes
very apparent when trying to bench under qemu in thumb mode!
We're not currently using these (at the moment it's unclear if the
original intention behind the treediff algorithms is worth pursuing),
and they are showing up in our heap benchmarks.
The good news is that means our heap benchmarks are working.
Also saves a bit of code/ctx in bmap mode:
code stack ctx
before: 37024 2352 684
after: 37024 (+0.0%) 2352 (+0.0%) 684 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
bmap before: 38752 2456 812
bmap after: 38704 (-0.1%) 2456 (+0.0%) 800 (-1.5%)
At least at a proof-of-concept level, there's still a lot of cleanup
needed.
To make things work, lfs3_alloc_ckpoint now takes an mdir, which
provides the target for gbmap gstate updates.
When the bmap is close to empty (configurable via bmap_scan_thresh), we
opportunistically rebuild it during lfs3_alloc_ckpoints. The nice thing
about lfs3_alloc_ckpoint is we know the state of all in-flight blocks,
so rebuilding the bmap just requires traversing the filesystem + in-RAM
state.
We might still fall back to the lookahead buffer, but in theory a well
tuned bmap_scan_thresh can prevent this from becoming a bottleneck (at
the cost of more frequent bmap rebuilds).
---
This is also probably a good time to resume measuring code/ram costs,
though it's worth repeating the above note about the bmap work still
needing cleanup:
code stack ctx
before: 36840 2368 684
after: 36920 (+0.2%) 2368 (+0.0%) 684 (+0.0%)
Haha, no, the bmap isn't basically free, it's just an opt-in features.
With -DLFS3_YES_BMAP=1:
code stack ctx
no bmap: 36920 2368 684
yes bmap: 38552 (+4.4%) 2472 (+4.4%) 812 (+18.7%)
Note --list-suite-paths was already skipping case-less suites! I think
only -Y/--summary was an outlier.
This is consistent with test.py's matching of suite ids when no cases
are found (test_runner itself doesn't really care, it just reports no
matching cases). Though we do still compile case-less suites and include
them in the test_suites array, which may be confusing in the future.
Note this includes both the lfs3_config -> lfs3_cfg structs as well as
the LFS3_CONFIG -> LFS3_CFG include define:
- LFS3_CONFIG -> LFS3_CFG
- struct lfs3_config -> struct lfs3_cfg
- struct lfs3_file_config -> struct lfs3_file_cfg
- struct lfs3_*bd_config -> struct lfs3_*bd_cfg
- cfg -> cfg
We were already using cfg as the variable name everywhere. The fact that
these names were different was an inconsistency that should be fixed
since we're committing to an API break.
LFS3_CFG is already out-of-date from upstream, and there's plans for a
config rework, but I figured I'd go ahead and change it as well to lower
the chances it gets overlooked.
---
Note this does _not_ affect LFS3_TAG_CONFIG. Having the on-disk vs
driver-level config take slightly different names is not a bad thing.
So we now keep blocks around until they can be replaced with a single
fragment. This is simpler, cheaper, and reduces the number of commits
needed to graft (though note arbitrary range removals still keep this
unbounded).
---
So, this is a delicate tradeoff.
On one hand, not fully fragmenting blocks risks keeping around bptrs
containing very little data, depending on fragment_size.
On the other hand:
- It's expensive, and disk utilization during random _deletes_ is not
the biggest of concerns.
Note our crystallization algorithm should still clean up partial
blocks _eventually_, so this doesn't really impact random writes.
The main concerns are lfs3_file_truncate/fruncate, and in the future
collapserange/punchhole.
- Fragmenting bptrs introduces more commits, which have their own
prog/erase cost, and it's unclear how this impacts logging operations.
There's no point in fragmenting blocks at the head of a log if we're
going to fruncate them eventually.
I figure lets err on minimizing complexity/code size for now, and if
this turns out to be a mistake, we can always revert or introduce
fragmenting >1 fragment blocks as an optional feature in the future.
---
Saves a big chunk of code, stack, and even some ctx (no more
fragment_thresh):
code stack ctx
before: 37504 2448 656
after: 37024 (-1.3%) 2416 (-1.3%) 652 (-0.6%)
This one was a bit more involved.
Removes utils that are no longer useful, and made sure some of the
name/API changes over time are adopted consistently:
- lfs_npw2 -> lfs_nlog2
- lfs_tole32_ -> lfs_tole32
- lfs_fromle32_ -> lfs_fromle32
Also did another pass for lfs_ prefixes on mem/str functions. The habit
to use the naked variants of these is hard to break!
This prevents runaway O(n^2) behavior on devices with extremely large
block sizes (NAND, bs=~128KiB - ~1MiB).
The whole point of shrubs is to avoid this O(n^2) runaway when inline
files become necessarily large. Setting FRAGMENT_SIZE to a factor of the
BLOCK_SIZE humorously defeats this.
The 512 byte cutoff is somewhat arbitrary, it's the natural BLOCK_SIZE/8
FRAGMENT_SIZE on most NOR flash (bs=4096), but it's probably worth
tuning based on actual device performance.
So now crystal_thresh only controls when fragments are compacted into
blocks, while fragment_thresh controls when blocks are broken into
fragments. Setting fragment_thresh=-1 will follow crystal_thresh and
keeps the previous behavior.
These were already two separate pieces of logic, so it makes sense to
provide two separate knobs for tuning.
Setting fragment_thresh lower than crystal_thresh has some potential to
reduce hysteresis in cases where random writes push blocks close to
crystal_thresh. It will be interesting to explore this more when
benchmarking.
---
The additional config option adds a bit of code/ctx, but hopefully that
will go away in the future config rework:
code stack ctx
before: 35584 2480 636
after: 35600 (+0.0%) 2480 (+0.0%) 640 (+0.6%)
And the related config options:
- cfg->file_buffer_size -> cfg->file_cache_size
- file->cfg->buffer_size -> file->cfg->cache_size
- file->cfg->buffer -> file->cfg->cache_buffer
The original motivation to rename this to file->buffer was to better
align with what other filesystems call this, but I think this is a case
where internal consistency is more important than external consistency.
file->cache better matches lfs->pcache and lfs->rcache, and makes it
easier to read code involving both file->cache and other user-provided
buffers.
Keeping the upstream name also helps with continuity.
While I think shrub_size is probably the more correct name at a
technical level, inline_size is probably more what users expect and
doesn't require a deeper understanding of filesystem details.
The only risk is that users may think inline_size has no effect on large
files, when in fact it still controls how much of the btree root can be
inlined.
There's also the point that sticking with inline_size maintains
compatibility with both the upstream version and any future version that
has other file representations.
May revisit this, but renaming to lfs->cfg->inline_size for now.
Now that we no longer have bmoss files, inline_size and shrub_size are
effectively the same thing.
We weren't using this, so no code change, but it does save a word of
ctx:
code stack ctx
before: 36280 2576 640
after: 36280 (+0.0%) 2576 (+0.0%) 636 (-0.6%)
Incremental gc, being stateful and not gc-able (ironic), was always
going to need to be conditionally compilable.
This moves incremental gc behind the LFS_GC define, so that we can focus
on the "default" costs. This cuts lfs_t in nearly half!
lfs_t with LFS_GC: 308
lfs_t without LFS_C: 168 (-45.5%)
This does save less code than one might expect though. We still need
most of the internal traversal/gc logic for things like block allocation
and orphan cleanup, so most of the savings is limited to the RAM storing
the incremental state:
code stack ctx
before: 37916 2608 768
after with LFS_CFG: 37944 (+0.1%) 2608 (+0.0%) 768 (+0.0%)
after without LFS_CFG: 37796 (-0.3%) 2608 (+0.0%) 620 (-19.3%)
On the flip side, this does mean most of the incremental gc
functionality is still availables in the lfsr_traversal_t APIs.
Applications with more advanced gc use-cases may actually benefit from
_not_ enabling the incremental gc APIs, and instead use the
lfsr_traversal_t APIs directly.
Before:
int lfsr_fs_gc(lfs_t *lfs, lfs_soff_t steps, uint32_t flags);
After:
int lfsr_gc(lfs_t *lfs);
int lfsr_gc_setflags(lfs_t *lfs, uint32_t flags);
int lfsr_gc_setsteps(lfs_t *lfs, lfs_soff_t steps);
---
The interesting thing about the lfsr_gc API is that the caller will
often be very different from whoever configures the system. One example
being an OS calling lfsr_gc in a background loop, while leaving
configuration up to the user.
The idea here, is instead of forcing the OS to come up with its own
stateful system to pass flags to lfsr_gc, we just embed this state in
littlefs directly. The whole point of lfsr_gc is that it's a stateful
system anyways.
Unfortunately this state does require a bit more logic to maintain,
which adds code/ctx cost:
code stack ctx
before: 37812 2608 752
after: 37916 (+0.3%) 2608 (+0.0%) 768 (+2.1%)
This was the one piece needed to be able to replace amor.py with csv.py.
The missing feature in csv.py is the ability to keep track of a
running-sum, but this is a bit of a hack in amor.py considering we
otherwise view csv entries as unordered.
We could add a running-sum to csv.py, or instead, just include a running
sum as a part of our bench output. We have all the information there
anyways, and if it simplifies the mess that is our csv scripts, that's a
win.
---
This also replaces the bench "meas", "iter", and "size" fields with the
slightly simpler "m" (measurement? metric?) and "n" fields. It's up to
the specific benchmark exactly how to interpret "n", but one field is
sufficient for existing scripts.
This moves all ckread-related logic behind the new opt-in compile-time
LFS_CKREADS flag. So in order to use ckreads you need to 1. define
LFS_CKREADS at compile time, and 2. pass LFS_M_CKREADS during
lfsr_mount.
This was always the plan since, even if ckreads worked perfectly, it
adds a significant amount of baggage (stack mostly) to track the
ck context of all reads.
---
This is the first non-trivial opt-in define in littlefs, so more test
framework features!
test.py and build.py now support the optional ifdef attribute, which
makes it easy to indicate a test suite/case should not be compiled when
a feature is missing.
Also interesting to note is the addition of LFS_IFDEF_CKREADS, which
solves several issues (and general ugliness) related to #ifdefs in
expression. For example:
// does not compile :( (can't embed ifdefs in macros)
LFS_ASSERT(flags == (
LFS_M_CKPROGS
#ifdef LFS_CKREADS
| LFS_M_CKREADS
#endif
))
// does compile :)
LFS_ASSERT(flags == (
LFS_M_CKPROGS
| LFS_IFDEF_CKREADS(LFS_M_CKREADS, 0)));
---
This brings us way back down to our pre-ckread levels of code/stack:
code stack
before-ckreads: 36352 2672
ckreads: 38060 (+4.7%) 3056 (+14.4%)
after-ckreads: 36428 (+0.2%) 2680 (+0.3%)
Unfortunately, we do end up with a bit more code cost than where we
started. Mainly due to code moving around to support the ckread
infrastructure:
code stack
lfsr_bd_readtag: +52 (+23.2%) +8 (+10.0%)
lfsr_rbyd_fetch: +36 (+5.0%) +8 (+6.2%, cold)
lfs_toleb128: -12 (-25.0%) -4 (-20.0%, cold)
total: +76 (+0.2%) +8 (+0.3%)
But oh well. Note that some of these changes are good even without
ckreads, such as only parsing the last ecksum tag.
So instead of configuring gc_steps at mount time (or eventually compile
time), lfsr_fs_gc now takes a steps parameter that controls how much gc
work to attempt:
int lfsr_fs_gc(lfs_t *lfs, lfs_soff_t steps, uint32_t flags);
This API was needed internally to better deduplicate on-mount gc, and I
figured it might also be useful for users to be able to easily change
gc_steps per lfsr_fs_gc call.
I realize this could also be accomplished with the theoretical
lfsr_fs_gccfg, but it's a bit easier to not need a struct every call.
Most likely, depending on project/system, users will always call
lfsr_fs_gc with either 1 (minimal work) or -1 (maximal work), or, worst
case, can define a system-wide GC_STEPS somewhere.
---
Deduplicating on-mount gc work better saved some code, though it's worth
noting this could have been done internally and not exposed to users:
code stack
before: 36476 2680 (+0.0%)
after: 36316 (-0.4%) 2680 (+0.0%)
This has been a long-time coming, mount flags are just too useful for
configuring a filesystem at runtime.
Currently this is limited to LFS_M_RDONLY and LFS_M_CKPROGS, but there
are a few more planned in the future:
LFS_M_RDWR = 0x0000, // Mount the filesystem as read and write
LFS_M_RDONLY = 0x0001, // Mount the filesystem as readonly
LFS_M_STRICT* = 0x0002, // Error if on-disk config does not match
LFS_M_FORCE* = 0x0004, // Ignore compat flags, mount readonly
LFS_M_FORCEWITHRECKLESSABANDON*
= 0x0008, // Ignore compat flags, mount read write
LFS_M_CKPROGS = 0x0010, // Check progs by reading back progged data
LFS_M_CKREADS* = 0x0020, // Check reads via checksums
* Hypothetical
As a convenience, we also return mount flags in the struct lfs_fsinfo's
flags field as their relevant LFS_I_* variants. Though only to match
statvfs, and only because it's cheap, littlefs's API is low-level and we
should expect users to know what flags they passed to lfsr_mount.
As for the new mount flags:
- LFS_M_RDONLY - For consistency with existing APIs, this just asserts
on write operations, which makes it a bit useless... But the info flag
LFS_I_RDONLY may be useful for falling back to a readonly mode if
we encounter on-disk compat issues.
At least if implement the theoretical LFS_UNTRUSTED_USER mode
LFS_M_RDONLY could become a runtime error.
- LFS_M_RDWR - This really just exists to compliment LFS_M_RDONLY and to
match LFS_O_RDONLY/LFS_O_RDWR. It's just an alias for 0, and I don't
think there will ever be a reason to make it non-0 (but I can always
be wrong!).
- LFS_M_CKPROGS - This replaces the check_progs config option and avoids
using a full byte to store a bool.
We should probably also have a compile-time option to compile this out
(LFS_NO_CKPROGS?), but that's a future thing to do.
This ended up adding a surprising bit of code, considering we're just
moving flags around, and noise in lfs_alloc added a bit of stack again:
code stack
before: 35880 2672
after: 35932 (+0.1%) 2680 (+0.3%)
Thinking about use case a bit, most lfsr_fs_gc will be to perform
background work, and can benefit from being incremental.
We already support incremental gc and all the mess associated with
traversal invalidation via the traversal API, so we might as well expose
this through lfsr_fs_gc.
The main downside is that we need to store an lfsr_traversal_t object
somewhere, which is not exactly a cheap struct. I was originally
considering limiting incremental gc to the traversal API for this
reason, but I think the value add of an incremental lfsr_fs_gc is too
compelling... Though we really should add a compile-time option
(LFS_NO_GC? LFS_NO_INCRGC?) to allow users to opt-out of this RAM cost
if they're never going to call this function.
Oh, and lfs_t also becomes self-referential, which might become a
problem for higher-level language users...
---
The incremental behavior of lfsr_fs_gc can be controlled by the new
gc_steps config option. This allows more than one step to be performed
at a time, which may allow for more progress when intermixed with
write-heavy filesystem operations. Setting gc_steps=-1 performs a full
traversal every call, which guarantees always making some amount of
progress.
This adds a bit of code, since we now need to check for/resume existing
traversals. But the real cost is the added RAM to lfs_t, which is
unfortunately wasted if you never call lfsr_fs_gc:
code stack lfs_t
before: 35708 2672 164
after: 35756 (+0.1%) 2672 (+0.0%) 296 (+80.5%)
lfs_fs_gc is still not reimplemented, but this is accessible through the
traversal API with LFS_T_COMPACT.
This is also the first traversal operation that can mutate the
filesystem, which brings its own set of problems:
- We need to set LFS_F_DIRTY in lfsr_mtree_gc now, which really
highlights how much of a mess having two flag fields is...
We do _not_ clobber in this case, since we assume lfsr_mtree_gc knows
what it's doing.
- We can now commit to an mroot in the mroot chain outside of the normal
mroot chain update logic.
This is a bit scary, but should just work.
The only issue so far is that we need to allow mdirs to follow the
mroot during mroot splits if mid=-1, even if they aren't lfs_t's mroot
mdir.
This should now be decently tested with the new
test_traversal_compact_* tests.
- It's easy for mtraversal's mdir and mtinfo's mdir to fall out of sync
when mutating... Why do we have two of these?
The actual compaction itself is pretty straightforward: just mark as
unerased, eoff=-1, and call lfsr_mdir_commit with an empty commit. This
is now wrapped up in lfsr_mdir_compact.
Code changes:
code stack
before: 34528 2640
after: 34652 (+0.4%) 2640 (+0.0%)
Though the real hard part will be implementing gc_compact_thresh over
btree nodes...
These emulate powerloss behavior where only some of the bits being
progged are actually progged if there is a powerloss. This behavior was
the original motivation for our ecksums/fcrcs, so it's good to have this
tested.
As a simplification, these only test the extremes:
- LFS_EMUBD_POWERLOSS_SOMEBITS => one bit progged
- LFS_EMUBD_POWERLOSS_MOSTBITS => all-but-one bit progged
Also they flips bits instead of preserving exact partial prog behavior,
but this is allowed (progs can have any intermediate value), has the
same effect as partial progs, and should encourage failed progs.
This required a number of tweaks in emubd: moved powerloss before prog,
moved mutate after powerloss, etc, but these shouldn't affect other
powerloss behaviors. Handling powerloss after prog was only to avoid
power_cycles=1 being useless, it's not strictly required.
Good news is testing so far suggests our ecksum design is sound.
More information upstream (f2a6f45, fc2aa33, 7873d81), but this adds
LFS_EMUBD_POWERLOS_OOO for testing out-of-order block devices that
require sync to be called for things to serialize. It's a simple
implementation, just reverts the first write since last sync on
powerloss, but gets the job done.
Cherry-picking these changes required reverting emubd's scratch buffer,
but carrying around an extra ~block_size of memory isn't a big deal
here.
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 really shouldn't be used all that often. Test filters are usually
used to protect against invalid test configurations, so if you bypass
test filters, expect things to fail!
But some filters just prevent test cases from taking too long. In these
cases being able to manually bypass the filter is useful for debugging/
benchmarking/etc...
This acts as a marker to indicate a fuzz test. It should reference a
define, usually SEED, that can be randomized to get interesting test
permutations.
This is currently unused, but could lead to some interesting uses such
as time-based fuzz testing. It's also just useful for inspecting the
tests (make test-list).
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%)
These seem fitting here, even if the test defines aren't "real defines".
The duplicate expressions should still be side-effect free and easy to
optimize out.
This should also avoid future lfs_min32 vs intmax_t issues.
A much requested feature, this allows much finer control of how RAM is
allocated for the system.
It was difficult to introduce this in previous versions of littlefs due
to how we steal caches during certain file operations, but now we don't
do that and treat the caches much more transparently.
Managing separate cache sizes does add a bit of code, but this is well
worth the potential for RAM savings due to increased flexibility:
code stack
before: 33656 2632
after: 33714 (+0.2%) 2640 (+0.3%)
Also interesting to note this reduces alignment requirements for the
rcache/pcache, since they don't need to share alignment, and completely
removes any alignment requirement from the file buffers.
Also added related asserts to lfs_init.
Note the fragment_size <= block_size/8 limit is to avoid wasteful corner
cases where only one fragment can fit in a block. The shrub_size <=
block_size/4 limit is looser because of how shrubs temporarily
overcommit.
As for the other limits, inline_size is bounded by shrub_size, and
crystal_thresh technically doesn't have a limit, though values >
block_size stop having an effect.
The main star of the show is the adoption of __builtin_trap() for
aborting on assert failure. I discovered this GCC/Clang extension
recently and it integrates much, _much_ better with GDB.
With stdlib's abort(), GDB drops you off in several layers of internal
stdlib functions, which is a pain to navigate out of to get to where the
assert actually happened. With __builtin_trap(), GDB stops immediately,
making debugging quick and easy.
This is great! The pain of debugging needs to come from understanding
the error, not just getting to it.
---
Also tweaked a few things with the internal print functions to make
reading the generated source easier, though I realize this is a rare
thing to do.
Motivation:
- Debuggability. Accessing the current test/bench defines from inside
gdb was basically impossible for some dumb macro-debug-info reason I
can't figure out.
In theory, GCC provides a .debug_macro section when compiled with -g3.
I can see this section with objdump --dwarf=macro, but somehow gdb
can't seem to find any definitions? I'm guess the #line source
remapping is causing things to break somehow...
Though even if macro-debugging gets fixed, which would be valuable,
accessing defines in the current test/bench runner can trigger quite
a bit of hidden machinery. This risks side-effects, which is never
great when debugging.
All of this is quite annoying because the test/bench defines is
usually the most important piece of information when debugging!
This replaces the previous hidden define machinery with simple global
variables, which gdb can access no problem.
- Also when debugging we no longer awkwardly step into the test_define
function all the time!
- In theory, global variables, being a simple memory access, should be
quite a bit faster than the hidden define machinery. This does matter
because running tests _is_ a dev bottleneck.
In practice though, any performance benefit is below the noise floor,
which isn't too surprising (~630s +-~20s).
- Using global variables for defines simplifies the test/bench runner
quite a bit.
Though some of the previous complexity was due to a whole internal
define caching system, which was supposed to lazily evaluate test
defines to avoid evaluating defines we don't use. This all proved to
be useless because the first thing we do when running each test is
evaluate all defines to generate the test id (lol).
So now, instead of lazily evaluating and caching defines, we just
generate global variables during compilation and evaluate all defines
for each test permutation immediately before running.
This relies heavily on __attribute__((weak)) symbols, and lets the
linker really shine.
As a funny perk this also effectively interns all test/bench defines by
the address of the resulting global variable. So we don't even need to
do string comparisons when mapping suite-level defines to the
runner-level defines.
---
Perhaps the more interesting thing to note, is the change in strategy in
how we actually evaluate the test defines.
This ends up being a surprisingly tricky problem, due to the potential
of mutual recursion between our defines.
Previously, because our define machinery was lazy, we could just
evaluate each define on demand. If a define required another define, it
would lazily trigger another evaluation, implicitly recursing through
C's stack. If cyclic, this would eventually lead to a stack overflow,
but that's ok because it's a user error to let this happen.
The "correct" way, at least in terms of being computationally optimal,
would be to topologically sort the defines and evaluate the resulting
tree from the leaves up.
But I ain't got time for that, so the solution here is equal parts
hacky, simple, and effective.
Basically, we just evaluate the defines repeatedly until they stop
changing:
- Initially, mutually recursive defines may read the uninitialized
values of their dependencies, and end up with some arbitrarily wrong
result. But as the defines are repeatedly evaluated, assuming no
cycles, the correct results should eventually bubble up the tree until
all defines converge to the correct value.
- This is O(n*e) vs O(n+e), but our define graph is usually quite
shallow.
- To prevent non-halting, we error after an arbitrary 1000 iterations.
If you hit this, it's likely because there is a cycle in the define
graph.
This is runtime configurable via the new --define-depth flag.
- To keep things consistent and reproducible, we zero initialize all
defines before the first evaluation.
I don't think this is strictly necessary, but it's important for the
test runner to have the exact same results on every run. No one wants
a "works on my machine" situation when the tests are involved.
Experimentation shows we only need an evaluation depth of 2 to
successfully evaluate the current set of defines:
$ ./runners/test_runner --list-defines --define-depth=2
And any performance impact is negligible (~630s +-~20s).
So:
switch (cond) {
case 0:;
// first case
break;
case 1:;
// second case
break;
default:;
// default case
break;
}
This basically adopts our current label style for the case statements in
switch statements. It initially looks like quite a monstrosity, but I
think it does a good job at highlighting that case statements in C are
no safer than labels and gotos.
I would not use this style in a language with better scoping in switch
statements.
I'd prefer not to use switch statements, their scoping rules in C are
just too error-prone, and the compiler usually optimizes things out
anyways, but there are some places where switch statements are clearly
the correct organization -- state machines such as lfsr_traversal_read
for example.
If you're curious about the ':;' ending, this is used in our current
style for labels to avoid "declaration is not a statement" warnings.
Which I think is just a bit of leftover from C historically not having
mixed statements/declarations.
So:
x = (cond) ? yes : no;
Where there are always parentheses around the condition, even if not
required for disambiguity. Additional parentheses are always allowed,
but the parenthesized condition helps signal that a ternary operator is
coming earlier in the expression.
This style has grown on me as I think it helps code readability. It
reminds me of the required parentheses for if/while statements.
Might as well adopt codebase-wide.
Now, when files are synced, they broadcast their disk changes to any other
opened file handles. In effect, all open files match disk after a sync
call to any opened file handle pointing to that file.
This was a much requested feature, as the previous behavior (multiple
opened file handles maintain independent snapshots) is pretty different
from other filesystems. It's also quite difficult to implement outside
of the filesystem, since you need to track all opened files, requiring
either unbounded RAM or a known upper limit.
---
A bit unrelated, but this commit also changes bshrub estimate
calculation to include all opened file handles. This adds some annoying
complexity, but is necessary to prevent sporadic ERANGE errors when
the same file is opened multiple times.
The current implementation just refetches on-disk metadata. This adds
some maybe unnecessary metadata lookups, but simplifies things by
avoiding the tracking of on-disk sprout/shrub size, which risks falling
out of date. Keep in mind we only recalculate the estimate every
~inline_size/2 bytes written.
Just like lfsr_mdir_estimate, this scales O(n^2) with the number of
opened files (this are basically the same function... hmmm... can they
be deduplicated?). This is unlikely to be a problem for littlefs's use
case, but just something to be aware of.
Code changes:
code stack
before: 32920 3032
after: 33192 (+0.8%) 3048 (+0.5%)
Our crystallization threshold doesn't really describe the bounds of an
object, and I think it's a bit easier to think of it as a threshold for
block compaction.
Heck I've already been calling this the crystallization threshold all
over the code base.
An important change is this bumps the value by 1 bytes, so
crystal_thresh now describes the smallest size of a block our write
strategy will attempt to write.
Heuristically:
- data >= crystal_thresh => compacted into blocks
- data < crystal_thresh => stored as fragments
The previous encoding was a bit problematic with our linear and log
heuristics, which can grow thousands of powerlosses deep. You know you
have a problem when you're copying a test id that spans a dozen lines.
It also meant we were spending O(n^2) time just encoding powerloss ids:
before: 942.68s
after: 921.94s (-2.2%)
This new encoding takes advantage of the unused characters in our leb16
encoding, with an 'x' prefix indicating linear-heuristic powerlosses
and a 'y' prefix indicating log-heuristic powerlosses ('w' is used for
negative leb16s).
Before:
- explicit: 42q2q2
- linear: 123456789abcdefg1h1i1j1k1l1m1n1o1p1q1r1s1t1u1v1
- log: 1248g1g2g4g8gg1gg2gg4gg8
After:
- explicit: 42q2q2
- linear: xg2
- log: yc
This turned out to not be all that useful.
Tests already take quite a bit to run, which is a good thing! We have a
lot of tests! 942.68s or ~15 minutes of tests at the time of writing to
be exact. But simply multiplying the number of tests by some number of
geometries is heavy handed and not a great use of testing time.
Instead, tests where different geometries are relevant can parameterize
READ_SIZE/PROG_SIZE/BLOCK_SIZE at the suite level where needed. The
geometry system was just another define parameterization layer anyways.
Testing different geometries can still be done in CI by overriding the
relevant defines anyways, and it _might_ be interesting there.
Christopher Haster