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-rw-r--r--pkg/sentry/fs/g3doc/fuse.md99
1 files changed, 98 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/pkg/sentry/fs/g3doc/fuse.md b/pkg/sentry/fs/g3doc/fuse.md
index 2ca84dd74..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
@@ -95,6 +95,103 @@ ops can be implemented in parallel.
- Implement the remaining FUSE ops and decide if we can omit rarely used
operations like ioctl.
+### Design Details
+
+#### Lifecycle for a FUSE Request
+
+- User invokes a syscall
+- Sentry prepares corresponding request
+ - If FUSE device is available
+ - Write the request in binary
+ - If FUSE device is full
+ - Kernel task blocked until available
+- Sentry notifies the readers of fuse device that it's ready for read
+- FUSE daemon reads the request and processes it
+- Sentry waits until a reply is written to the FUSE device
+ - but returns directly for async requests
+- FUSE daemon writes to the fuse device
+- Sentry processes the reply
+ - For sync requests, unblock blocked kernel task
+ - For async requests, execute pre-specified callback if any
+- Sentry returns the syscall to the user
+
+#### Channels and Queues for Requests in Different Stages
+
+`connection.initializedChan`
+
+- a channel that the requests issued before connection initialization blocks
+ on.
+
+`fd.queue`
+
+- a queue of requests that haven’t been read by the FUSE daemon yet.
+
+`fd.completions`
+
+- a map of the requests that have been prepared but not yet received a
+ response, including the ones on the `fd.queue`.
+
+`fd.waitQueue`
+
+- a queue of waiters that is waiting for the fuse device fd to be available,
+ such as the FUSE daemon.
+
+`fd.fullQueueCh`
+
+- 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