1ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
2ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab
3ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab==============
4ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabFuse I/O Modes
5ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab==============
6ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab
7ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabFuse supports the following I/O modes:
8ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab
9ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab- direct-io
10ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab- cached
11ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab  + write-through
12ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab  + writeback-cache
13ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab
14ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabThe direct-io mode can be selected with the FOPEN_DIRECT_IO flag in the
15ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabFUSE_OPEN reply.
16ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab
17ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabIn direct-io mode the page cache is completely bypassed for reads and writes.
18ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabNo read-ahead takes place. Shared mmap is disabled.
19ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab
20ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabIn cached mode reads may be satisfied from the page cache, and data may be
21ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabread-ahead by the kernel to fill the cache.  The cache is always kept consistent
22ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabafter any writes to the file.  All mmap modes are supported.
23ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab
24ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabThe cached mode has two sub modes controlling how writes are handled.  The
25ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabwrite-through mode is the default and is supported on all kernels.  The
26ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabwriteback-cache mode may be selected by the FUSE_WRITEBACK_CACHE flag in the
27ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabFUSE_INIT reply.
28ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab
29ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabIn write-through mode each write is immediately sent to userspace as one or more
30ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabWRITE requests, as well as updating any cached pages (and caching previously
31ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabuncached, but fully written pages).  No READ requests are ever sent for writes,
32ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabso when an uncached page is partially written, the page is discarded.
33ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab
34ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho ChehabIn writeback-cache mode (enabled by the FUSE_WRITEBACK_CACHE flag) writes go to
35ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabthe cache only, which means that the write(2) syscall can often complete very
36ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabfast.  Dirty pages are written back implicitly (background writeback or page
37ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabreclaim on memory pressure) or explicitly (invoked by close(2), fsync(2) and
38ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabwhen the last ref to the file is being released on munmap(2)).  This mode
39ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabassumes that all changes to the filesystem go through the FUSE kernel module
40ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehab(size and atime/ctime/mtime attributes are kept up-to-date by the kernel), so
41ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabit's generally not suitable for network filesystems.  If a partial page is
42ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabwritten, then the page needs to be first read from userspace.  This means, that
43ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabeven for files opened for O_WRONLY it is possible that READ requests will be
44ba302d2aSMauro Carvalho Chehabgenerated by the kernel.
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