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Full Discussion: Help with Inodes please
Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Help with Inodes please Post 302567242 by Group_Inode on Sunday 23rd of October 2011 11:19:20 AM
Old 10-23-2011
OS : freebsd 8.2 release

As of now we have understood that any program uses struct stat structure to store temporary inode info and display it. The struct stat structure gets info from struct inode (defined in inode.h) which in turn gets info from struct dinode. The struct dinode is (or may be, I am not sure) is the actual physical representation of the inode structure.

I also tried studying ls.c source code. I found that it uses another important structures struct FTS and struct FTSENT for traversing the file system hierarchy using functions defined in fts.c. Now the problem is that fts.c uses systemcalls like fstat() and open() for accessing inode information
I'm trying to find how the information is retrieved from dinode and printed on the console or to the file. Once I know how it is retrieved, I'll try to add a field to dinode structure last_modified_by i.e it would have the username who lastly modified that file. I'll probably try to modify ls.c also to display information on console.

I think the path for the system calls are two fold:
1. Filesystem Independent system calls present in /usr/src/lib/libstand
2. Filesystem Dependent system calls present in /usr/src/lib/libstand/<file_system.c>

I have read /usr/src/lib/libstand/stand.h which I think is the periphery of Platform Independence. I t has a structure called struct fs_ops which has function pointers for system calls like *open(), *stat(), *fstat() etc.
These function pointers are made to point to actual system calls from different Platform Dependent file systems like ext2fs , ufs etc.
This is done by the open system call ( by reading from the struct open_file files] and struct fs_ops *file_system[).
I think if we want to add thi field for a particular file system, then I should try to make changes in file system C files like ufs.c and vfs.c ( and so on ...)

Now I was thinking that modifying already implemented file systems is a messy thing. So, I was planning to make my own file system. This file system code will only include the necessary fs_ops (File system Operations i.e. system calls) and putting the appropriate pointers in stand.h. Am I thinking right?

I read an IBM Developer Forum for FUSE which explained how to create a File System in User Space which explained something very similar. The link is as follows:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fuse/

Can you please suggest if I am on the right track or not. And also can you suggest some links I can read, that might help me for the same( ie For creating or modifying the file system)

Last edited by Group_Inode; 01-08-2012 at 01:31 AM..
 

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UFS_DISK_CLOSE(3)					   BSD Library Functions Manual 					 UFS_DISK_CLOSE(3)

NAME
ufs_disk_close, ufs_disk_fillout, ufs_disk_fillout_blank, ufs_disk_write -- open and close userland UFS disks LIBRARY
UFS File System Access Library (libufs, -lufs) SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/param.h> #include <sys/mount.h> #include <ufs/ufs/ufsmount.h> #include <ufs/ufs/dinode.h> #include <ufs/ffs/fs.h> #include <libufs.h> int ufs_disk_close(struct uufsd *disk); int ufs_disk_fillout(struct uufsd *disk, const char *name); int ufs_disk_fillout_blank(struct uufsd *disk, const char *name); int ufs_disk_write(struct uufsd *disk); DESCRIPTION
The ufs_disk_close() function closes a disk and frees internal memory related to it. It does not free the disk structure. The ufs_disk_fillout() and ufs_disk_fillout_blank() functions open a disk specified by name and populate the structure pointed to by disk. The disk is opened read-only. The specified name may be either a mountpoint, a device name or a filesystem image. The ufs_disk_fillout() function assumes there is a valid superblock and will fail if not, whereas the ufs_disk_fillout_blank() function makes no assumptions of that sort. The ufs_disk_write() function attempts to re-open a disk as writable if it is not currently. ERRORS
The function ufs_disk_close() has no failure points. The function ufs_disk_fillout() may fail for any of the reasons ufs_disk_fillout_blank() might, as well as for any reason sbread(3) might. The ufs_disk_fillout_blank() may fail and set errno for any of the errors specified for the library functions open(2), strdup(3). Addition- ally, it may follow the libufs(3) error methodologies in situations where no device could be found to open. The function ufs_disk_write() may fail and set errno for any of the errors specified for the library functions open(2) and stat(2). Namely, it will fail if the disk in question may not be written to. SEE ALSO
open(2), getfsfile(3), libufs(3), sbread(3) HISTORY
These functions first appeared as part of libufs(3) in FreeBSD 5.0. AUTHORS
Juli Mallett <jmallett@FreeBSD.org> BSD
June 4, 2003 BSD
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