Merge patch series "tmpfs: Add case-insensitive support for tmpfs"
André Almeida <andrealmeid@igalia.com> says:
This patchset adds support for case-insensitive file names lookups in
tmpfs. The main difference from other casefold filesystems is that tmpfs
has no information on disk, just on RAM, so we can't use mkfs to create a
case-insensitive tmpfs. For this implementation, I opted to have a mount
option for casefolding. The rest of the patchset follows a similar approach
as ext4 and f2fs.
The use case for this feature is similar to the use case for ext4, to
better support compatibility layers (like Wine), particularly in
combination with sandboxing/container tools (like Flatpak). Those
containerization tools can share a subset of the host filesystem with an
application. In the container, the root directory and any parent
directories required for a shared directory are on tmpfs, with the
shared directories bind-mounted into the container's view of the
filesystem.
If the host filesystem is using case-insensitive directories, then the
application can do lookups inside those directories in a
case-insensitive way, without this needing to be implemented in
user-space. However, if the host is only sharing a subset of a
case-insensitive directory with the application, then the parent
directories of the mount point will be part of the container's root
tmpfs. When the application tries to do case-insensitive lookups of
those parent directories on a case-sensitive tmpfs, the lookup will
fail.
For example, if /srv/games is a case-insensitive directory on the host,
then applications will expect /srv/games/Steam/Half-Life and
/srv/games/steam/half-life to be interchangeable; but if the
container framework is only sharing /srv/games/Steam/Half-Life and
/srv/games/Steam/Portal (and not the rest of /srv/games) with the
container, with /srv, /srv/games and /srv/games/Steam as part of the
container's tmpfs root, then making /srv/games a case-insensitive
directory inside the container would be necessary to meet that
expectation.
I send a patch for xfstests to enable the casefold test (generic/556) for
tmpfs.[1] The test succeed.
You can test this patchset using:
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o casefold tmpfs mnt/
And making a dir case-insensitive:
mkdir mnt/dir
chattr +F mnt/dir
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/fstests/20240823173008.280917-1-andrealmeid@igalia.com/
* patches from https://lore.kernel.org/r/20241021-tonyk-tmpfs-v8-0-f443d5814194@igalia.com:
docs: tmpfs: Add casefold options
tmpfs: Expose filesystem features via sysfs
tmpfs: Add flag FS_CASEFOLD_FL support for tmpfs dirs
tmpfs: Add casefold lookup support
libfs: Export generic_ci_ dentry functions
unicode: Recreate utf8_parse_version()
unicode: Export latest available UTF-8 version number
ext4: Use generic_ci_validate_strict_name helper
libfs: Create the helper function generic_ci_validate_strict_name()
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20241021-tonyk-tmpfs-v8-0-f443d5814194@igalia.com
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
