[Lustre-devel] Caching the root directory

[Ken Hornstein]

So, with a not inconsiderable amount of pain, I've got attribute caching
working on the Mac client.  Hooray!

But there is one wrinkle that bugs me: I can't figure out how to cache any
information off of the root directory of a filesystem.

In MacOS X (and from what I can tell, most vnode-derived systems), you
never get a "lookup" call for the root node in your filesystem; it's
managed by the operating system, and when you traverse a mountpoint the
operating system then just substitutes "your" root node for the root
directory (there's a special function just to fetch the root node information).

The whole setup works out that you never end up with a lookup for the
root node (the filesystem path is cached so when you would look up "."
in the root directory, it ends up just back at the root node again
without a lookup call).  And now that I think about it, I'm not sure
how you could even do that, since one of the arguments to the lookup
RPC is the parent directory and what do you put in for that for the
root node?

Obviously I can still fetch the directory attributes when the OS asks for
it, but in a perfect world I'd cache that information.  I've looked at the
Linux client, but it's not clear what happens in the root node case.
Can someone shed some light on this?  Does Linux cache the root node
attribute information?  If so, how does it do that?

--Ken