summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorLiav A <liavalb@gmail.com>2022-11-11 13:29:36 +0200
committerAndrew Kaster <andrewdkaster@gmail.com>2022-11-25 14:43:28 -0700
commit71536e91c56f1d03fc934a37f502df46b16d92be (patch)
tree5d9bd1e1c8497f73235bed0fc2eb9bcd377b045b
parent9e7d099678f5f5cafabfc487f0808e06876ca6fe (diff)
downloadserenity-71536e91c56f1d03fc934a37f502df46b16d92be.zip
Documentation: Add a document about TmpFS
-rw-r--r--Documentation/Kernel/TmpFS.md70
1 files changed, 70 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/Kernel/TmpFS.md b/Documentation/Kernel/TmpFS.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..7ba607eb60
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/Kernel/TmpFS.md
@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+# `TmpFS` filesystem and its purposes
+
+`TmpFS` is a RAM-backed filesystem. It is used to hold files and directories in the `/tmp` directory and
+device nodes in the `/dev` directory.
+
+## What are the `TmpFS` filesystem characteristics?
+
+`TmpFS` is a pure RAM-backed filesystem, which means all files and directories
+actually live in memory, each in its own `TmpFS` instance in the kernel.
+
+The `TmpFS` in its current design is very conservative about allocating virtual memory ranges
+for itself, and instead it uses the `AnonymousVMObject` object to hold physical pages containing
+data for its inodes. When doing actual IO, the `TmpFS` code temporarily allocates a small virtual memory
+`Memory::Region` to perform the task, which works quite well although it puts a strain on the virtual memory
+mapping code. The current design also ensures that fabricated huge files can be easily created in the filesystem
+with very small overhead until actual IO is performed.
+
+### The `/tmp` directory and its purposes
+
+Currently, the `/tmp` directory is the **place** for facilitating the inter-process
+communication layer, with many Unix sockets nodes being present in the directory.
+
+Many test suites in the project leverage the `/tmp` for placing their test files
+when trying to check the correctness of many system-related functionality.
+Other programs rely on `/tmp` for placing their temporary files to properly function.
+
+### Why does the `TmpFS` work well for the `/dev` directory?
+
+To understand why `TmpFS` works reliably when mounted on `/dev`, we must understand
+first what we did in the past and how `TmpFS` solves many of the issues with the previous design.
+
+At first, we didn't have any special filesystem mounted in `/dev` as the image build
+script generated all the required device nodes in `/dev`. This was quite sufficient in
+the early days of the project, where hardware support was extremely limited and of course
+hotplugging any kind of hardware was not even a consideration.
+
+As the project grew larger and more hardware support was introduced, it became obvious
+that this "solution" was not future-proof. For example, if one user has two SATA drives
+connected to his computer, and another user has just one old IDE drive being used,
+then how should we support both cases? The answer was that each user could simply invoke
+the `mknod` utility to create device nodes. This solution meant that user interaction as well
+as a deep understanding of kernel internals was required to achieve a proper setup.
+
+When it became apparent that another solution was needed, the `DevFS` filesystem was
+invented. The idea was plain simple - the `DevFS` is a read-only filesystem that only
+lists all present char and block devices. Permissions were hardcoded at known value,
+and modifying the filesystem (including adding subdirectories) was strictly prohibited.
+This solution was efficient in the sense of ensuring minimal user interaction for using
+device nodes in `/dev`. The shortcomings were strictly immutable filesystem layout and hardcoded
+permissions. Also, the filesystem implementation was specific to `/dev`, because no other
+mount in the system used this special filesystem, which meant it needed special test cases, etc.
+
+The `DevFS` solution was short-lived, and was quickly replaced by the `DevTmpFS` solution.
+That new shiny filesystem was again specific to `/dev`, but it solved many of the issues
+`DevFS` suffered from - no more hardcoded permissions and now the design has flexible filesystem
+layout in its mindset.
+This was achieved by implementing from scratch a filesystem that resembles the `TmpFS`
+filesystem, but was different in one major aspect - only device nodes and directories are allowed
+to be in `/dev`. This strict requirement has been mandated to ensure the user doesn't
+accidentally put unrelated files in `/dev`. When the `DevTmpFS` was invented, it clearly
+needed userspace cooperation to create device nodes in `/dev`, so `SystemServer` was modified
+to create those during boot. The process of how `SystemServer` does that is not discussed
+in this document, but ultimately evolved to be flexible enough to work quite well.
+
+Everything worked quite well, but there was still a prominent problem with `DevTmpFS` -
+it was an entire filesystem solution just for `/dev` and nobody else used it.
+Testing the filesystem was quite clunky and truthfully lacking from the beginning until its removal.
+To solve this problem, it was decided to stop using it, and instead just use `TmpFS`.
+To ensure the current behavior of disallowing regular files in `/dev`, a new mount flag called
+`MS_NOREGULAR` was invented, so it could be mounted with it.