[RFC v2] Unicode/UTF-8 support for XFS

[Olaf Weber]

On 26-09-14 21:46, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 09:37:11PM +0200, Olaf Weber wrote:
>>
>> My argument against "mount time case-insensitivity" and for "mkfs
>> time case-insensitivity" is related to switching from the
>> case-sensitive domain to the case-insensitive one.
>>
>> For case-sensitive, from "README" to "readme" there are 64 different
>> possible filenames.  Let's say you create 63 out of these 64. Now
>> remount the filesystem case-insensitive, and try to open by the 64th
>> version of "readme". It is not an exact match for any of the 63
>> candidate files, and a case-insensitive match to all 63 candidate
>> files. Which of these 63 files should be opened, and why that one in
>> particular?
>
> I'm ok with "mkfs time case-insensitivity" - really !
> Most of my OEMs would set that and claim victory (few
> of them care much about NFS semantics :-).

I'd say you can have CIFS-style case-insensitive semantics or NFS-style 
case-sensitive semantics, but not both. And in particular, that a customer 
should not actually want to have both.

>>> Having CI matching can speed up Samba operations by a
>>> factor of 10 on large directories (warning, number made
>>> up, depending on the number of entries per dir :-).
>>
>> I really want that to be true, but the proof of the pudding...
>
> No it really *is* true. The reason I can't give
> exact numbers is it depends on the number of entries.
>
> Remember, for every cache *miss*, we have to scan
> the entire directory.
>
> So a user asks for README, and we attempt that
> and it fails. So now we have to enumerate the
> entire directory to see if READMe (or any other
> case varient) exists.
>
> Now do that in a directory with 10, 100, 1000,
> .... 10000000 existing files (don't laugh, I've
> seen an application for Music files that did
> *exactly* that). On a case insensitive filesystem
> you just request README and you're done.
>
> Certain vendors who shall remain nameless :-)
> created test cases of just this example to
> show how much storage on Linux sucks. Not
> a happy camper about that - and telling them
> to use ZFS on FreeBSD or Solaris just doesn't
> feel right :-).

Here's the thing to bear in mind: what I did is a straightforward extension 
of the existing XFS ASCII-based case-insensitive code. If that gets you the 
desired performance improvement, then my code should extend that to more 
general usage. If it doesn't, then there are places in XFS that I haven't 
touched that need modification to have these cases work well.

Olaf

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