Ckfetches implements what might be your first idea on how to check
checksums in a filesystem: Check each block/mdir on first access
(fetch) to make sure the data is sound.
Unfortunately, there are two problems with this approach, both which
come from the fact that blocks are big and can't fit in RAM:
1. We still have a checksum-read hole.
We can't keep a whole block around in RAM, so reads after a fetch may
need to reread from disk, at which point new bit-errors may slip in
undetected.
This is especially problematic for traversing our rbyds, which
involves a lot of small reads in a block.
2. Ckfetches may have a surprisingly negative performance impact.
Consider the case of reading a large file with a bunch of small
reads. Because we don't cache blocks, each read may need a btree
lookup, and a full block fetch. On paper this can quickly end up
O(b^2), which is not great.
Though this is helped by the file buffer. It will be interesting to
benchmark and see if this theoretical O(b^2) translates to poor
performance in practice.
Note ckreads has this same performance issue.
Still, despite these problems, ckfetches may be useful for cases where
you just want an extra layer of safety, or don't care about the tiny
chance an error is introduced between a fetch an subsequent read.
---
Like ckprogs/ckreads, ckfetches is an opt-in feature, and requires both
1. defining LFS_CKFETCHES, and 2. passing LFS_M_CKFETCHES during mount.
This is a bit of a quick implementation to get testing in place, so the
code cost is probably higher than strictly necessary. If we can refactor
the code internally to avoid all the duplicate lfsr_rbyd_fetchck/
lfsr_bptr_ck calls, we can probably bring this down a bit:
code stack
before: 36428 2680
yes-ckfetches: 36848 (+1.2%) 2680 (+0.0%)
no-ckfetches: 36428 (+0.0%) 2680 (+0.0%)
Oh, and also added lfs_emubd_flipbit to allow tests to manually flip
bits themselves. LFS_EMUBD_BADBLOCK_PROGFLIP is quick to find the above
mentioned checksum-read hole.
This could be done manually with read+erase+prog, but no reason to make
it harder than it needs to be.
So just like ckreads, ckprogs is now opt-in, requiring both 1. defining
LFS_CKPROGS at compile-time, and 2. passing the LFS_M_CKPROGS flag
during lfsr_mount.
_Unlike_ ckreads, ckprogs is actually a very lightweight feature. So the
difference between compiling with/without ckprogs is really quite small:
code stack
before: 36480 2680
yes-ckprogs: 36480 (+0.0%) 2680 (+0.0%)
no-ckprogs: 36428 (-0.1%) 2680 (+0.0%)
It's almost not worth putting behind an ifdef if not for consistency
with ckreads.
This is mainly to solve the weird check-hole where passing CKPROGS/
CKREADS as mount flags has no effect on lfsr_format (I mean, it'd be a
bit silly if it did somehow):
LFS_F_RDWR 0 // Format the filesystem as read and write
LFS_F_CKPROGS 0x00000010 // Check progs by reading back progged data
LFS_F_CKREADS 0x00000020 // Check reads via parity bits/checksums
This makes lfsr_format a more cumbersome interface, but I don't know if
this is necessarily a bad thing. There's always risk of data loss when
calling lfsr_format, so maybe it should be a pain to call.
At the very least, format flags may be useful in the future for
enabling/disabling format-time things such as the planned block-map,
parity-tree, etc. Though it's unclear if such significant settings
should be format flags or somehow encoded as fields in our config
struct.
---
The LFS_F_* format flags of course ended up conflicting with our
internal LFS_F_* flags, so I renamed most of the internal flags to match
the closest flag set they participate in:
- LFS_F_TYPE -> LFS_O_TYPE
- LFS_F_UNFLUSH -> LFS_O_UNFLUSH
- LFS_F_UNSYNC -> LFS_O_UNSYNC
- LFS_F_ORPHAN -> LFS_O_ORPHAN
- LFS_F_ZOMBIE -> LFS_O_ZOMBIE
- LFS_F_ORPHANS -> LFS_I_ORPHANS
- LFS_F_UNCOMPACTED -> LFS_I_UNCOMPACTED
- LFS_F_TSTATE -> LFS_T_TSTATE
- LFS_F_BTYPE -> LFS_T_BTYPE
- LFS_F_DIRTY -> LFS_T_DIRTY
- LFS_F_MUTATED -> LFS_T_MUTATED
This may make it a bit less clear which flags are a part of the public
API, vs intended only for internal use, but at the very least our asserts
in format/mount/open/etc should catch most of these mistakes.
---
Code cost ended up being pretty minimal. Actually negative. This is the
second time we're _adding_ a feature that somehow saves code, though the
reality for this one is we're really just pushing constants up into the
user's stack frame. Still, it's a good indication the cost of format
flags is small:
code stack
before: 36452 2680
after: 36448 (-0.0%) 2680 (+0.0%)
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.
Added some code, though we don't _really_ care:
code stack
before: 37872 3048
after: 38060 (+0.5%) 3056 (+0.3%)
Also interesting to note the difference in testing time, this highlights
_some_ of the performance cost of ckreads:
with ckreads: 1135.92s
without ckreads: 821.24s
Metastability is a rather nasty error condition where successive reads
to a memory location may return different values, either due to bus
issues or a failed prog. It's a tricky error condition to detect, and
one that ckreads was, in theory, supposed to help with.
To help test metastability (and other single-bit errors), emubd gained
several new features:
- LFS_EMUBD_BADBLOCK_PROGFLIP - Prog flips a bit
- LFS_EMUBD_BADBLOCK_READFLIP - Read flips a bit sometimes
- LFS_EMUBD_POWERLOSS_METASTABLE - Reads may flip a bit
These only affect a single bit in a given block, but by randomizing
which bit during every erase (and exhaustive bit testing in test_ck) we
should still see some fairly interesting bit-error patterns over time.
It's a bit difficult to test with more than a single bit error because
you can quickly find checksum/parity collisions when fuzz testing. But
there may be other interesting error patterns to look at in the future?
Also the erase_cycles implementation got a bit of a rework since it was
lopsided previously (progs/reads would always error before erases). And
since I was messing with emubd's internals I added lfs_emubd_markbad/
markgood and a few other convenience functions that seem useful:
- lfs_emubd_seed - Manually set the prng, needed in test_ck actually
- lfs_emubd_markbad - Mark block as bad, same as wear=-1
- lfs_emubd_markgood - Mark block as good, same as wear=0
- lfs_emubd_badbit - Get which big failed
- lfs_emubd_setbadbit - Set which bit will fail
- lfs_emubd_randomizebadbit - Randomize bad bit on erase
- lfs_emubd_markbadbit - Mark bit as bad, same as setbadbit+markbad
---
The intention of this new metastability emulation was to extend test_ck
to test ckreads/ckprogs. This went... interestingly.
The good news, the new emulation and tests worked quite well. They were
able to quite quickly show that ckreads is fundamentally not able to
detect all single-bit errors in our current design.
The problem boils down to the fact that the location of our parity bits
depends on the tag's leb128-encoded size. If a bit flip changes this
size field, we end up with a new parity bit, which 50/50 may or may not
detect the error.
For example, one bit flip:
40 0c 00 12 80 0d ff ff
'----.----' ^--------------------.
'- altble 0xc w0 -18 parity=1
40 0c 80 12 80 0d ff ff
'-------.-------' ^----------------------.
'- altble 0xc w2304 -1664 parity=1
This doesn't make ckreads _completely_ useless, just mostly useless. We
can still use it to check parity bits, but without a systematic proof.
But there's enough problems with ckreads: performance, RAM, code, etc,
that I think it may just be an interesting proof-of-concept and not
something users should actually use. Checking reads in the bd-layer
solves all of these problems...
---
At the very least ckprogs gets better testing, thanks to new tests in
test_ck and the addition of LFS_EMUBD_BADBLOCK_PROGFLIP in
test_badblocks.
The extra testing also found a ckprog/ckread hole in that we don't
ckprog/ckread during lfsr_format! I fixed this by making lfsr_format
always use ckprogs/ckreads if available, but maybe lfsr_format should
take its own set of flags?
Funnily enough this had no impact on code size since it probably just
changed the constant in a constant pool:
code stack
before: 37872 3048
after: 37872 (+0.0%) 3048 (+0.0%)
These flags just call lfsr_file_ckmeta/ckdata under the hood, but make
it very easy to check metadata/data when opening a file. As an extra
plus they implicitly close the file on failure, so might make cleanup
easier.
Of course, everything has a cost:
code stack
before: 36368 2664
after: 36424 (+0.2%) 2664 (+0.0%)
These also ruin my previous "you don't pay for what you don't call"
assertion, since runtime flags unfortunately always pull in code.
We should add a compile-time switch for these evntually.
These are basically the same as lfsr_fs_ckmeta/ckdata but limited to a
single file. They may be useful when you need to validate a file but
don't want to bother validating the entire filesystem:
// Check a file for metadata errors
int lfsr_file_ckmeta(lfs_t *lfs, lfsr_file_t *file);
// Check a file for metadata + data errors
int lfsr_file_ckdata(lfs_t *lfs, lfsr_file_t *file);
I've also added test_ck to test these and added some more
lfsr_fs_ckmeta/ckdata tests there. These currently just test simple
full-block clobbering, but we should eventually test more interesting
error patterns.
Unfortunately lfsr_file_ckmeta/ckdata can't reuse the internal
lfsr_mtree_traverse in quite the same way lfsr_fs_ckmeta/ckdata can, so
they're actually a bit more expensive. Though keep in mind with
link-time gc you won't pay the cost unless you call these functions:
code stack
before: 36024 2696
after: 36368 (+1.0%) 2664 (-1.2%)
Oh, and the multiple calls to lfsr_btree/bshrub_traverse apparently
uninlined it out of lfsr_mtree_traverse, saving the stack cost in the
stack hot-path... Yay?
Christopher Haster