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This document is for a development version of Ceph.

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This document is for an unsupported version of Ceph.

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MDS internal data structures

CInode

CInode contains the metadata of a file, there is one CInode for each file. The CInode stores information like who owns the file, how big the file is.

CDentry

CDentry is the glue that holds inodes and files together by relating inode to file/directory names. A CDentry links to at most one CInode (it may not link to any CInode). A CInode may be linked by multiple CDentries.

CDir

CDir only exists for directory inode, it’s used to link CDentries under the directory. A CInode can have multiple CDir when the directory is fragmented.

These data structures are linked together as:

CInode
CDir
 |   \
 |      \
 |         \
CDentry   CDentry
CInode    CInode
CDir      CDir
 |         |  \
 |         |     \
 |         |        \
CDentry   CDentry  CDentry
CInode    CInode   CInode

As this doc is being written, size of CInode is about 1400 bytes, size of CDentry is about 400 bytes, size of CDir is about 700 bytes. These data structures are quite large. Please be careful if you want to add new fields to them.

OpenFileTable

Open file table tracks open files and their ancestor directories. Recovering MDS can easily get open files’ paths, significantly reducing the time of loading inodes for open files. Each entry in the table corresponds to an inode, it records linkage information (parent inode and dentry name) of the inode. MDS can constructs the inode’s path by recursively lookup parent inode’s linkage. Open file table is stored in omap of RADOS objects, table entries correspond to KV pairs in omap.