This file describes the design, layouts, and file formats of a
libsvn_fs_fs repository.
Design
------
In FSFS, each committed revision is represented as an immutable file
containing the new node-revisions, contents, and changed-path
information for the revision, plus a second, changeable file
containing the revision properties.
In contrast to the BDB back end, the contents of recent revision of
files are stored as deltas against earlier revisions, instead of the
other way around. This is less efficient for common-case checkouts,
but brings greater simplicity and robustness, as well as the
flexibility to make commits work without write access to existing
revisions. Skip-deltas and delta combination mitigate the checkout
cost.
In-progress transactions are represented with a prototype rev file
containing only the new text representations of files (appended to as
changed file contents come in), along with a separate file for each
node-revision, directory representation, or property representation
which has been changed or added in the transaction. During the final
stage of the commit, these separate files are marshalled onto the end
of the prototype rev file to form the immutable revision file.
Layout of the FS directory
--------------------------
The layout of the FS directory (the "db" subdirectory of the
repository) is:
revs Subdirectory containing revs
<revnum> File containing rev <revnum>
revprops Subdirectory containing rev-props
<revnum> File containing rev-props for <revnum>
transactions Subdirectory containing transactions
<txnid>.txn Directory containing transaction <txnid>
locks Subdirectory containing locks
partial-digest Subdirectory named for first 3 letters of an MD5 digest
<digest> File containing locks/children for path with <digest>
current File specifying current revision
write-lock Lockfile for commits
Files in the revprops directory are in the hash dump format used by
svn_hash_write.
The format of the "current" file is a single line of the form
"<youngest-revision> <next-node-id> <next-copy-id>\n" giving the
youngest revision, the next unique node-ID, and the next unique
copy-ID for the repository.
The "write-lock" file is an empty file which is locked before the
final stage of a commit and unlocked after the new "current" file has
been moved into place to indicate that a new revision is present.
Node-revision IDs
-----------------
In order to support efficient lookup of node-revisions by their IDs
and to simplify the allocation of fresh node-IDs during a transaction,
we treat the fields of a node-ID in new and interesting ways.
Within a revision file, node-revs have a txn-id field of the form
"r<rev>/<offset>", to support easy lookup. The node-id and copy-id
fields are unique base36 values as in the BDB implementation.
New node-revision IDs assigned within a transaction have the txn-id
field of "t<txnid>". The node-id or copy-id field may be base36
values if the node-revision is derived from a pre-existing node and/or
copy; if the node-revision must have a freshly-assigned node-id or
copy-id, it uses "_" followed by a base36 unique to the transaction.
During the final phase of a commit, node-revision IDs are rewritten to
have unique node-ID and copy-ID fields and to have "r<rev>/<offset>"
txn-id fields.
The temporary assignment of node-ID and copy-ID fields has
implications for svn_fs_compare_ids and svn_fs_check_related. The IDs
_1.0.t1 is not related to the ID _1.0.t2 even though they have the
same node-ID, because temporary node-IDs are restricted in scope to
the transactions they belong to.
Copy-IDs and copy roots
-----------------------
Copy-IDs are assigned in the same manner as they are in the BDB
implementation:
* A node-rev resulting from a creation operation (with no copy
history) receives the copy-ID of its parent directory.
* A node-rev resulting from a copy operation receives a fresh
copy-ID, as one would expect.
* A node-rev resulting from a modification operation receives a
copy-ID depending on whether its predecessor derives from a
copy operation or whether it derives from a creation operation
with no intervening copies:
- If the predecessor does not derive from a copy, the new
node-rev receives the copy-ID of its parent directory. If the
node-rev is being modified through its created-path, this will
be the same copy-ID as the predecessor node-rev has; however,
if the node-rev is being modified through a copied ancestor
directory (i.e. we are performing a "lazy copy"), this will be
a different copy-ID.
- If the predecessor derives from a copy and the node-rev is
being modified through its created-path, the new node-rev
receives the copy-ID of the predecessor.
- If the predecessor derives from a copy and the node-rev is not
being modified through its created path, the new node-rev
receives a fresh copy-ID. This is called a "soft copy"
operation, as distinct from a "true copy" operation which was
actually requested through the svn_fs interface. Soft copies
exist to ensure that the same <node-ID,copy-ID> pair is not
used twice within a transaction.
Unlike the BDB implementation, we do not have a "copies" table.
Instead, each node-revision record contains a "copyroot" field
identifying the node-rev resulting from the true copy operation most
proximal to the node-rev. If the node-rev does not itself derive from
a copy operation, then the copyroot field identifies the copy of an
ancestor directory; if no ancestor directories derive from a copy
operation, then the copyroot field identifies the root directory of
rev 0.
Revision file format
--------------------
A revision file contains a concatenation of various kinds of data:
* Text and property representations
* Node-revisions
* At the end, the changed-path data
* Two offsets at the very end
A representation begins with a line containing either "PLAIN\n" or
"DELTA\n" or "DELTA <rev> <offset> <length>\n", where <rev>, <offset>,
and <length> give the location of the delta base of the representation
and the amount of data it contains (not counting the header or
trailer). If no base location is given for a delta, the base is the
empty stream. After the initial line comes raw svndiff data, followed
by a cosmetic trailer "ENDREP\n".
If the a representation is for the text contents of a directory node,
the expanded contents are in hash dump format mapping entry names to
"<type> <id>" pairs, where <type> is "file" or "dir" and <id> gives
the ID of the child node-rev.
If a representation is for a property list, the expanded contents are
in the form of a dumped hash map mapping property names to property
values.
The marshalling syntax for node-revs is a series of fields terminated
by a blank line. Fields have the syntax "<name>: <value>\n", where
<name> is a symbolic field name (each symbolic name is used only once
in a given node-rev) and <value> is the value data. Unrecognized
fields are ignored, for extensibility. The following fields are
defined:
id The ID of the node-rev
type "file" or "dir"
pred The ID of the predecessor node-rev
count Count of node-revs since the base of the node
text "<rev> <offset> <length> <size> <digest>" for text rep
props "<rev> <offset> <length> <size> <digest>" for props rep
<rev> and <offset> give location of rep
<length> gives length of rep, sans header and trailer
<size> gives size of expanded rep
<digest> gives hex MD5 digest of expanded rep
cpath FS pathname node was created at
copyfrom "<rev> <path>" of copyfrom data
copyroot "<rev> <created-path>" of the root of this copy
The predecessor of a node-rev crosses both soft and true copies;
together with the count field, it allows efficient determination of
the base for skip-deltas. The first node-rev of a node contains no
"pred" field. A node-revision with no properties may omit the "props"
field. A node-revision with no contents (a zero-length file or an
empty directory) may omit the "text" field. In a node-revision
resulting from a true copy operation, the "copyfrom" field gives the
copyfrom data. The "copyroot" field identifies the root node-revision
of the copy; it may be omitted if the node-rev is its own copy root
(as is the case for node-revs with copy history, and for the root node
of revision 0). Copy roots are identified by revision and
created-path, not by node-rev ID, because a copy root may be a
node-rev which exists later on within the same revision file, meaning
its offset is not yet known.
The changed-path data is represented as a series of changed-path
items, each consisting of two lines. The first line has the format
"<id> <action> <text-mod> <prop-mod> <path>\n", where <id> is the
node-rev ID of the new node-rev, <action> is "add", "delete",
"replace", or "modify", <text-mod> and <prop-mod> are "true" or
"false" indicating whether the text and/or properties changed, and
<path> is the changed pathname. For deletes, <id> is the node-rev ID
of the deleted node-rev, and <text-mod> and <prop-mod> are always
"false". The second line has the format "<rev> <path>\n" containing
the node-rev's copyfrom information if it has any; if it does not, the
second line is blank.
At the very end of a rev file is a pair of lines containing
"\n<root-offset> <cp-offset>\n", where <root-offset> is the offset of
the root directory node revision and <cp-offset> is the offset of the
changed-path data.
All numbers in the rev file format are unsigned and are represented as
ASCII decimal.
Transaction layout
------------------
A transaction directory has the following layout:
rev Prototype rev file with new text reps
rev-lock Lockfile for writing to the above
props Transaction props
next-ids Next temporary node-ID and copy-ID
changes Changed-path information so far
node.<nid>.<cid> New node-rev data for node
node.<nid>.<cid>.props Props for new node-rev, if changed
node.<nid>.<cid>.children Directory contents for node-rev
The prototype rev file is used to store the text representations as
they are received from the client. To ensure that only one client is
writing to the file at a given time, the "rev-lock" file is locked for
the duration of each write.
The two kinds of props files are both in hash dump format.
The "next-ids" file contains a single line "<next-temp-node-id>
<next-temp-copy-id>\n" giving the next temporary node-ID and copy-ID
assignments (without the leading underscores).
The "children" file for a node-revision begins with a copy of the hash
dump representation of the directory entries from the old node-rev (or
a dump of the empty hash for new directories), and then an incremental
hash dump entry for each change made to the directory.
The "changes" file contains changed-path entries in the same form as
the changed-path entries in a rev file, except that <id> and <action>
may both be "reset" (in which case <text-mod> and <prop-mod> are both
always "false") to indicate that all changes to a path should be
considered undone. Reset entries are only used during the final merge
phase of a transaction.
The node-rev files have the same format as node-revs in a revision
file, except that the "text" and "props" fields are augmented as
follows:
* The "props" field may have the value "-1" if properties have
been changed and are contained in a "props" file within the
node-rev subdirectory.
* For directory node-revs, the "text" field may have the value
"-1" if entries have been changed and are contained in a
"contents" file in the node-rev subdirectory.
* For file node-revs, the "text" field may have the value "-1
<offset> <length> <size> <digest>" if the text representation is
within the prototype rev file.
* The "copyroot" field may have the value "-1 <created-path>" if the
copy root of the node-rev is part of the transaction in process.
Locks layout
------------------
Locks in FSFS are stored in serialized hash format in files whose
names are MD5 digests of the FS path which the lock is associated
with. For the purposes of keeping directory inode usage down, these
digest files live in subdirectories of the main lock directory whose
names are the first 3 characters of the digest filename.
Also stored in the digest file for a given FS path are pointers to
other digest files which contain information associated with other FS
paths that are our path's immediate children.
To answer the question, "Does path FOO have a lock associated with
it?", one need only generate the MD5 digest of FOO's
absolute-in-the-FS path (say, 3b1b011fed614a263986b5c4869604e8), look
for a file located like so:
/path/to/repos/locks/3b1/3b1b011fed614a263986b5c4869604e8
And then see if that file contains lock information.
To inquire about locks on children of the path FOO, you would
reference the same path as above, but look for a list of children in
that file (instead of lock information). Children are listed as MD5
digests, too, so you would simply iterate over those digests and
consult the files they reference, and so on, recursively.