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bug (?) with statvfs call on a subvolume

DISCUSSION [email protected] 1 participant 1 message Jul 11, 2010 Btrfs file system

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I am trying to use EncFS in conjunction with btrfs and I ran into a weird situation which I think is caused by statvfs being called on a btrfs subvolume.

In particular, when I do something like the following:
statvfs("/mnt/btrfs-volume/some-subvolume")
then all mounted FUSE file-systems receive a GETATTR request. This is strange because it happens to FUSE file-systems completely unrelated to /mnt/btrfs-volume.

This can cause serious problems with some FUSE file-systems such as EncFS. For instance, suppose that you have an EncFS file-systems as follows:
encfs /mnt/btrfs-volume/some-subvolume /home/user/private
Whenever you do statvfs("/home/user/private") then EncFS will internally call statvfs("/mnt/btrfs-volume/some-subvolume") but this in turn will cause the FUSE method getattr to be called. This cycle of dependencies results in a deadlock.

STEP TO REPRODUCE:
1. btrfs subvolume create /mnt/btrfs-volume/private
2. mkdir /home/user/private
3. encfs /mnt/btrfs-volume/private /home/user/private
4. [ do statvfs("/home/user/private") ]

In step 4, stavfs will never return and /home/user/private will become unresponsive.