Merge pull request #3989 from jinmouil:feature/fuse-fix

PiperOrigin-RevId: 332548335

1 files changed, 52 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/pkg/sentry/fs/g3doc/fuse.md b/pkg/sentry/fs/g3doc/fuse.md
index eccb1fb2f..05e043583 100644
--- a/pkg/sentry/fs/g3doc/fuse.md
+++ b/pkg/sentry/fs/g3doc/fuse.md
@@ -79,7 +79,7 @@ ops can be implemented in parallel.
 -   Implement `/dev/fuse` - a character device used to establish an FD for
     communication between the sentry and the server daemon.
 
--   Implement basic FUSE ops like `FUSE_INIT`, `FUSE_DESTROY`.
+-   Implement basic FUSE ops like `FUSE_INIT`.
 
 #### Read-only mount with basic file operations
 
@@ -141,6 +141,57 @@ ops can be implemented in parallel.
 -   a channel that the kernel task will be blocked on when the fd is not
     available.
 
+#### Basic I/O Implementation
+
+Currently we have implemented basic functionalities of read and write for our
+FUSE. We describe the design and ways to improve it here:
+
+##### Basic FUSE Read
+
+The vfs2 expects implementations of `vfs.FileDescriptionImpl.Read()` and
+`vfs.FileDescriptionImpl.PRead()`. When a syscall is made, it will eventually
+reach our implementation of those interface functions located at
+`pkg/sentry/fsimpl/fuse/regular_file.go` for regular files.
+
+After validation checks of the input, sentry sends `FUSE_READ` requests to the
+FUSE daemon. The FUSE daemon returns data after the `fuse_out_header` as the
+responses. For the first version, we create a copy in kernel memory of those
+data. They are represented as a byte slice in the marshalled struct. This
+happens as a common process for all the FUSE responses at this moment at
+`pkg/sentry/fsimpl/fuse/dev.go:writeLocked()`. We then directly copy from this
+intermediate buffer to the input buffer provided by the read syscall.
+
+There is an extra requirement for FUSE: When mounting the FUSE fs, the mounter
+or the FUSE daemon can specify a `max_read` or a `max_pages` parameter. They are
+the upperbound of the bytes to read in each `FUSE_READ` request. We implemented
+the code to handle the fragmented reads.
+
+To improve the performance: ideally we should have buffer cache to copy those
+data from the responses of FUSE daemon into, as is also the design of several
+other existing file system implementations for sentry, instead of a single-use
+temporary buffer. Directly mapping the memory of one process to another could
+also boost the performance, but to keep them isolated, we did not choose to do
+so.
+
+##### Basic FUSE Write
+
+The vfs2 invokes implementations of `vfs.FileDescriptionImpl.Write()` and
+`vfs.FileDescriptionImpl.PWrite()` on the regular file descriptor of FUSE when a
+user makes write(2) and pwrite(2) syscall.
+
+For valid writes, sentry sends the bytes to write after a `FUSE_WRITE` header
+(can be regarded as a request with 2 payloads) to the FUSE daemon. For the first
+version, we allocate a buffer inside kernel memory to store the bytes from the
+user, and copy directly from that buffer to the memory of FUSE daemon. This
+happens at `pkg/sentry/fsimpl/fuse/dev.go:readLocked()`
+
+The parameters `max_write` and `max_pages` restrict the number of bytes in one
+`FUSE_WRITE`. There are code handling fragmented writes in current
+implementation.
+
+To have better performance: the extra copy created to store the bytes to write
+can be replaced by the buffer cache as well.
+
 # Appendix
 
 ## FUSE Protocol