[LU-9680] Improve the user land to kernel space interface for lustre

• Type: Improvement
• Status: In Progress
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: Lustre 2.11.0
• Fix Version/s: Upstream
• Assignee: James A Simmons
• Reporter: James A Simmons

Description

Lustre currently has a complex assortment of ioctls for both the file system component and the LNet layer. Many of the those ioctls are no longer used or can be replaced with accessing files in the sysfs or debugfs file systems. With the initial review of lustre in the upstream kernel two topics on how ioctls are managed to brought to our attention. One is the dislike of the ioctl redirection that is done in lustre. The seconds is the request that we use the netlink userland API, in particular with the LNet layer. The netlink API could also be used for lustre.

Issue Links

• is related to: LU-16715 Resolve genl_lock might_sleep bug
• is related to: LU-11850 Relocating /proc/fs/lustre/ost to /sys/kernel/debug/lustre/ost prevents non-root access
• is related to: LU-14391 Large network routes
• is related to: LU-8915 Don't use linux list structure as user land arguments for lnet selftest
• is related to: LU-10003 lnetctl error "cannot add network: invalid argument"
• is related to: LU-16460 fix lnetctl command line option bugs
• is related to: LU-12198 lnetctl peer show hangs for ~2600 clients, ioctl getting E2BIG
• is related to: LU-14732 struct hsm_user_request extent fields set to random values.
• is related to: LU-16241 Kernel 3.10 Build Fail on Master (3ffcb5b70) with NL_SET_ERR_MSG not defined
• is related to: LU-16346 lctl stack smashing on aarch64 platform
• is related to: LU-16462 conf-sanity sles12.5 test_43a: lctl: attr.c:201: validate_nla: Assertion `0' failed.
• is related to: LU-16552 LNet: crash on deleting an NI using lnetctl
• is related to: LU-12511 Prepare lustre for adoption into the linux kernel
• is related to: LU-14680 remove strict dependency between user tools and kernel RPMs
• is related to: LU-6202 clean up ioctl handling
• is related to: LU-8834 Don't hide new functionality behind ioctls.
• is related to: LU-9667 LNet Kernel/Userspace Interface
• is related to: LU-7659 Replace KUC by more standard mechanisms
• is related to: LU-10968 add coordinator bypass upcalls for HSM archive and remove