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authorJan Kara <jack@suse.cz>2007-10-16 23:29:31 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>2007-10-17 08:42:56 -0700
commit8e8934695dfd1d5013555a74a9da706a2e301cb0 (patch)
treeedef65302982cbd3e18cf4ef3c88040939886e3a /Documentation/filesystems
parentfac8b209b1084bc85748bd54e13d00c1262b220f (diff)
quota: send messages via netlink
Implement sending of quota messages via netlink interface. The advantage is that in userspace we can better decide what to do with the message - for example display a dialogue in your X session or just write the message to the console. As a bonus, we can get rid of problems with console locking deep inside filesystem code once we remove the old printing mechanism. Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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+
+Quota subsystem
+===============
+
+Quota subsystem allows system administrator to set limits on used space and
+number of used inodes (inode is a filesystem structure which is associated
+with each file or directory) for users and/or groups. For both used space and
+number of used inodes there are actually two limits. The first one is called
+softlimit and the second one hardlimit. An user can never exceed a hardlimit
+for any resource. User is allowed to exceed softlimit but only for limited
+period of time. This period is called "grace period" or "grace time". When
+grace time is over, user is not able to allocate more space/inodes until he
+frees enough of them to get below softlimit.
+
+Quota limits (and amount of grace time) are set independently for each
+filesystem.
+
+For more details about quota design, see the documentation in quota-tools package
+(http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxquota).
+
+Quota netlink interface
+=======================
+When user exceeds a softlimit, runs out of grace time or reaches hardlimit,
+quota subsystem traditionally printed a message to the controlling terminal of
+the process which caused the excess. This method has the disadvantage that
+when user is using a graphical desktop he usually cannot see the message.
+Thus quota netlink interface has been designed to pass information about
+the above events to userspace. There they can be captured by an application
+and processed accordingly.
+
+The interface uses generic netlink framework (see
+http://lwn.net/Articles/208755/ and http://people.suug.ch/~tgr/libnl/ for more
+details about this layer). The name of the quota generic netlink interface
+is "VFS_DQUOT". Definitions of constants below are in <linux/quota.h>.
+ Currently, the interface supports only one message type QUOTA_NL_C_WARNING.
+This command is used to send a notification about any of the above mentioned
+events. Each message has six attributes. These are (type of the argument is
+in parentheses):
+ QUOTA_NL_A_QTYPE (u32)
+ - type of quota being exceeded (one of USRQUOTA, GRPQUOTA)
+ QUOTA_NL_A_EXCESS_ID (u64)
+ - UID/GID (depends on quota type) of user / group whose limit
+ is being exceeded.
+ QUOTA_NL_A_CAUSED_ID (u64)
+ - UID of a user who caused the event
+ QUOTA_NL_A_WARNING (u32)
+ - what kind of limit is exceeded:
+ QUOTA_NL_IHARDWARN - inode hardlimit
+ QUOTA_NL_ISOFTLONGWARN - inode softlimit is exceeded longer
+ than given grace period
+ QUOTA_NL_ISOFTWARN - inode softlimit
+ QUOTA_NL_BHARDWARN - space (block) hardlimit
+ QUOTA_NL_BSOFTLONGWARN - space (block) softlimit is exceeded
+ longer than given grace period.
+ QUOTA_NL_BSOFTWARN - space (block) softlimit
+ QUOTA_NL_A_DEV_MAJOR (u32)
+ - major number of a device with the affected filesystem
+ QUOTA_NL_A_DEV_MINOR (u32)
+ - minor number of a device with the affected filesystem