GEOM(4)

💖 GEOM 💖 — the modular disk I/O request transformation framework

okay so bestie, welcome to GEOM(4), a.k.a. the Kernel Interfaces Manual page that's about to make you obsessed with how your disks actually work. this is the framework that sits between the upper kernel and your device drivers and just… transforms I/O requests on the way through. iconic behavior, honestly.

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✨ NAME ✨

GEOM — modular disk I/O request transformation framework 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

so you turn these on as kernel options, like:

options GEOM_BDE
options GEOM_CACHE
options GEOM_CONCAT
options GEOM_ELI
options GEOM_GATE
options GEOM_JOURNAL
options GEOM_LABEL
options GEOM_LINUX_LVM
options GEOM_MAP
options GEOM_MIRROR
options GEOM_MOUNTVER
options GEOM_MULTIPATH
options GEOM_NOP
options GEOM_PART_APM
options GEOM_PART_BSD
options GEOM_PART_BSD64
options GEOM_PART_EBR
options GEOM_PART_EBR_COMPAT
options GEOM_PART_GPT
options GEOM_PART_LDM
options GEOM_PART_MBR
options GEOM_PART_VTOC8
options GEOM_RAID
options GEOM_RAID3
options GEOM_SHSEC
options GEOM_STRIPE
options GEOM_UZIP
options GEOM_VIRSTOR
options GEOM_ZERO

pick your fighters, bestie. each one's a whole vibe. 💅

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so picture this: the GEOM framework gives you an infrastructure where things called “classes” get to perform transformations on disk I/O requests — like, on their little journey from the upper kernel down to the device drivers and then back again. it's giving ✨middle management but make it useful✨.

and the range of transformations?? immaculate. we're talking everything from the simple geometric displacement that your typical disk partitioning modules do, all the way through RAID algorithms and device multipath resolution, up to full blown cryptographic protection of the stored data. the range. the versatility. we love to see it. 🔥

now, compared to traditional “volume management”, GEOM differs from most implementations — and in some cases all previous implementations — in the following ways:

• GEOM is extensible. writing a whole new class of transformation is trivially simple, and it will not be given stepchild treatment, no cap. like, if someone for some reason wanted to mount IBM MVS diskpacks, writing a class that recognizes and configures their VTOC information would be a trivial matter. casual flex tbh. 💪
• GEOM is topologically agnostic. most volume management implementations have very strict notions of how classes can fit together — very often one fixed hierarchy is provided, for instance, subdisk - plex - volume.

being extensible means that new transformations are treated no differently than existing transformations. equal treatment, periodt. 👑

and fixed hierarchies are bad because they make it impossible to express the intent efficiently. like, in that fixed hierarchy up there? you literally cannot mirror two physical disks and then partition the mirror into subdisks. instead you're forced to make subdisks on the physical volumes and then mirror these two and two, which results in a much more complex configuration. 😭

GEOM on the other hand? does not care in which order things are done. the only restriction is that cycles in the graph will not be allowed. that's it. that's the rule. 🚫

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🌸 TERMINOLOGY AND TOPOLOGY 🌸

GEOM is quite object oriented, which is why the terminology borrows a lot of context and semantics from the OO vocabulary. so let's do a little glossary moment, bestie. 📚

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🎀 the cast of characters 🎀

a “class”, represented by the data structure g_class, implements one particular kind of transformation. typical examples are MBR disk partition, BSD disklabel, and RAID5 classes. main character energy, each and every one. ✨

an instance of a class is called a “geom” and is represented by the data structure g_geom. in a typical i386 FreeBSD system, there will be one geom of class MBR for each disk. one per disk, no sharing, we respect boundaries here. 💅

a “provider”, represented by the data structure g_provider, is the front gate at which a geom offers service. a provider is “a disk-like thing which appears in /dev” — a logical disk, in other words. and all providers have three main properties: “name”, “sectorsize” and “size”. the holy trinity. 🙏

a “consumer” is the backdoor through which a geom connects to another geom provider, and through which I/O requests are sent. yes bestie, front gate and backdoor, they said what they said. 😌

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🦋 how they all fit together 🦋

the topological relationship between these entities goes as follows:

• a class has zero or more geom instances.
• a geom has exactly one class it is derived from.
• a geom has zero or more consumers.
• a geom has zero or more providers.
• a consumer can be attached to zero or one providers.
• a provider can have zero or more consumers attached.

look at that structure. chef's kiss. 🤌

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👑 rank numbers (the vibe check for loops) 👑

all geoms have a rank-number assigned, which is used to detect and prevent loops in the acyclic directed graph. and this rank number is assigned as follows:

1. a geom with no attached consumers has rank=1.
2. a geom with attached consumers has a rank one higher than the highest rank of the geoms of the providers its consumers are attached to.

so yeah. rank climbs, loops get caught, and the graph stays acyclic. as it should be. 🧚

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✨ SPECIAL TOPOLOGICAL MANEUVERS ✨

okay so besides the basic attach (which glues a consumer onto a provider) and detach (which breaks that bond 💔), there are a bunch of extra special topological maneuvers that exist to make configuration easier and to level up the overall flexibility. bestie, they're iconic.

TASTING is the process that happens whenever a new class or a new provider gets created, and it gives the class a lil chance to automatically configure an instance on providers it recognizes as its own. 🍓 The typical example is the MBR disk-partition class, which will go looking for the MBR table in the first sector and, if it's found and validated, will instantiate a geom to multiplex according to the contents of the MBR.

A new class will be offered to all existing providers in turn, and a new provider will be offered to all classes in turn. 💫

Exactly what a class does to recognize if it should accept the offered provider is not defined by GEOM, but the sensible set of options are:

• Examine specific data structures on the disk.
• Examine properties like “sectorsize” or “mediasize” for the provider.
• Examine the rank number of the provider's geom.
• Examine the method name of the provider's geom.

ORPHANIZATION is the process by which a provider gets removed while it potentially is still being used. 😭

When a geom orphans a provider, all future I/O requests will “bounce” on the provider with an error code set by the geom. Any consumers attached to the provider will receive notification about the orphanization when the event loop gets around to it, and they can take appropriate action at that time. ✨

A geom which came into being as a result of a normal taste operation should self-destruct unless it has a way to keep functioning whilst lacking the orphaned provider. Geoms like disk slicers should therefore self-destruct, whereas RAID5 or mirror geoms will be able to continue as long as they do not lose quorum. 💅

When a provider is orphaned, this does not necessarily result in any immediate change in the topology: any attached consumers are still attached, any opened paths are still open, any outstanding I/O requests are still outstanding.

The typical scenario is:

• A device driver detects a disk has departed and orphans the provider for it.
• The geoms on top of the disk receive the orphanization event and orphan all their providers in turn. Providers which are not attached to will typically self-destruct right away. This process continues in a quasi-recursive fashion until all relevant pieces of the tree have heard the bad news. 💀
• Eventually the buck stops when it reaches geom_dev at the top of the stack.
• Geom_dev will call destroy_dev(9) to stop any more requests from coming in. It will sleep until any and all outstanding I/O requests have been returned. It will explicitly close (i.e.: zero the access counts), a change which will propagate all the way down through the mesh. It will then detach and destroy its geom.
• The geom whose provider is now detached will destroy the provider, detach and destroy its consumer and destroy its geom.
• This process percolates all the way down through the mesh, until the cleanup is complete.

While this approach seems byzantine, it does provide the maximum flexibility and robustness in handling disappearing devices. no cap. 🫶

The one absolutely crucial detail to be aware of is that if the device driver does not return all I/O requests, the tree will not unravel. 😱

SPOILING is a special case of orphanization used to protect against stale metadata. It is probably easiest to understand spoiling by going through an example. 🧚

Imagine a disk, da0, on top of which an MBR geom provides da0s1 and da0s2, and on top of da0s1 a BSD geom provides da0s1a through da0s1e, and that both the MBR and BSD geoms have autoconfigured based on data structures on the disk media. Now imagine the case where da0 is opened for writing and those data structures are modified or overwritten: now the geoms would be operating on stale metadata unless some notification system can inform them otherwise. 🙈

To avoid this situation, when the open of da0 for write happens, all attached consumers are told about this and geoms like MBR and BSD will self-destruct as a result. When da0 is closed, it will be offered for tasting again and, if the data structures for MBR and BSD are still there, new geoms will instantiate themselves anew. ✨

Now for the fine print:

If any of the paths through the MBR or BSD module were open, they would have opened downwards with an exclusive bit thus rendering it impossible to open da0 for writing in that case. Conversely, the requested exclusive bit would render it impossible to open a path through the MBR geom while da0 is open for writing.

From this it also follows that changing the size of open geoms can only be done with their cooperation.

Finally: the spoiling only happens when the write count goes from zero to non-zero and the retasting happens only when the write count goes from non-zero to zero. 📉📈

CONFIGURE is the process where the administrator issues instructions for a particular class to instantiate itself. There are multiple ways to express intent in this case — a particular provider may be specified with a level of override forcing, for instance, a BSD disklabel module to attach to a provider which was not found palatable during the TASTE operation. 💅

Finally, I/O is the reason we even do this: it concerns itself with sending I/O requests through the graph. 🔥

I/O REQUESTS, represented by struct bio, originate at a consumer, are scheduled on its attached provider and, when processed, are returned to the consumer. It is important to realize that the struct bio which enters through the provider of a particular geom does not “come out on the other side”. Even simple transformations like MBR and BSD will clone the struct bio, modify the clone, and schedule the clone on their own consumer. Note that cloning the struct bio does not involve cloning the actual data area specified in the I/O request. 👑

In total, four different I/O requests exist in GEOM: read, write, delete, and “get attribute”.

Read and write are self explanatory.

Delete indicates that a certain range of data is no longer used and that it can be erased or freed as the underlying technology supports. Technologies like flash adaptation layers can arrange to erase the relevant blocks before they will become reassigned and cryptographic devices may want to fill random bits into the range to reduce the amount of data available for attack. 🔐

It is important to recognize that a delete indication is not a request and consequently there is no guarantee that the data actually will be erased or made unavailable unless guaranteed by specific geoms in the graph. If “secure delete” semantics are required, a geom should be pushed which converts delete indications into (a sequence of) write requests. ⚠️

“Get attribute” supports inspection and manipulation of out-of-band attributes on a particular provider or path. Attributes are named by ASCII strings and they will be discussed in a separate section below.

(Stay tuned while the author rests his brain and fingers: more to come.) 😭💖

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🌈 DIAGNOSTICS 🌈

Several flags are provided for tracing GEOM operations and unlocking protection mechanisms via the kern.geom.debugflags sysctl. All of these flags are off by default, and great care should be taken in turning them on. 🚨

• 0x01 (G_T_TOPOLOGY) — Provide tracing of topology change events.
• 0x02 (G_T_BIO) — Provide tracing of buffer I/O requests.
• 0x04 (G_T_ACCESS) — Provide tracing of access check controls.
• 0x08 — (unused) 💀
• 0x10 (allow foot shooting) — Allow writing to Rank 1 providers. This would, for example, allow the super-user to overwrite the MBR on the root disk or write random sectors elsewhere to a mounted disk. The implications are obvious. 🙈🔫
• 0x40 (G_F_DISKIOCTL) — This is unused at this time.
• 0x80 (G_F_CTLDUMP) — Dump contents of gctl requests.

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🎀 OBSOLETE OPTIONS 🎀

The following options have been deprecated and will be removed in FreeBSD 12: GEOM_BSD, GEOM_FOX, GEOM_MBR, GEOM_SUNLABEL, and GEOM_VOL. 💀

Use GEOM_PART_BSD, GEOM_MULTIPATH, GEOM_PART_MBR, GEOM_PART_VTOC8, GEOM_LABEL options, respectively, instead. ✨

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

libgeom(3), DECLARE_GEOM_CLASS(9), disk(9), g_access(9), g_attach(9), g_bio(9), g_consumer(9), g_data(9), g_event(9), g_geom(9), g_provider(9), g_provider_by_name(9)

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🦋 HISTORY 🦋

This software was developed for the FreeBSD Project by Poul-Henning Kamp and NAI Labs, the Security Research Division of Network Associates, Inc. under DARPA/SPAWAR contract N66001-01-C-8035 (“CBOSS”), as part of the DARPA CHATS research program. 🫶

The first precursor for GEOM was a gruesome hack to Minix 1.2 and was never distributed. An earlier attempt to implement a less general scheme in FreeBSD never succeeded. 😭

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💜 AUTHORS 💜

Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.org>

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aaaand that's a wrap bestie, periodt. 💅✨ This lil slice of FreeBSD history is from the Debian build, dated April 9, 2018, filed under GEOM(4) — and yes, she ate. 🎀👑