.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
Orphan file
-----------
In unix there can inodes that are unlinked from directory hierarchy but that
are still alive because they are open. In case of crash the filesystem has to
clean up these inodes as otherwise they (and the blocks referenced from them)
would leak. Similarly if we truncate or extend the file, we need not be able
to perform the operation in a single journalling transaction. In such case we
track the inode as orphan so that in case of crash extra blocks allocated to
the file get truncated.
Traditionally ext4 tracks orphan inodes in a form of single linked list where
superblock contains the inode number of the last orphan inode (s_last_orphan
field) and then each inode contains inode number of the previously orphaned
inode (we overload i_dtime inode field for this). However this filesystem
global single linked list is a scalability bottleneck for workloads that result
in heavy creation of orphan inodes. When orphan file feature
(COMPAT_ORPHAN_FILE) is enabled, the filesystem has a special inode
(referenced from the superblock through s_orphan_file_inum) with several
blocks. Each of these blocks has a structure:
============= ================ =============== ===============================
Offset Type Name Description
============= ================ =============== ===============================
0x0 Array of Orphan inode Each __le32 entry is either
__le32 entries entries empty (0) or it contains
inode number of an orphan
inode.
blocksize-8 __le32 ob_magic Magic value stored in orphan
block tail (0x0b10ca04)
blocksize-4 __le32 ob_checksum Checksum of the orphan block.
============= ================ =============== ===============================
When a filesystem with orphan file feature is writeably mounted, we set
RO_COMPAT_ORPHAN_PRESENT feature in the superblock to indicate there may
be valid orphan entries. In case we see this feature when mounting the
filesystem, we read the whole orphan file and process all orphan inodes found
there as usual. When cleanly unmounting the filesystem we remove the
RO_COMPAT_ORPHAN_PRESENT feature to avoid unnecessary scanning of the orphan
file and also make the filesystem fully compatible with older kernels.
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