Sign in

Search issue titles and bodies, change requests and comments. Private repositories you cannot read are not included.

vole
Clone

Read only, no credentials:

https://rodent.software/git/vole.git

Write over SSH with a registered key:

git clone ssh://git@0.0.0.0:2222/vole.git

A free and open-source forge that lives in your Git repo.

Phase 5: an object is served only through a repository that holds it

65b88b3b1940623b6f7fbc686b19e986497c9ff2 · Keenan Nemetz · 16d ago · parent bf1e027c

Phase 5: an object is served only through a repository that holds it

The store was instance-wide and content-addressed, so an object was fetchable
through any repository whose read rule you passed, provided you knew its
sha256. That is now impossible, and the fix is structural rather than a check:
the pool still holds the bytes once, and each repository has a hard link into
a namespace of its own (data/lfs/repos/<repo>/…). A fetch reads only that
namespace, so "which repository owns these bytes" stops being a database
question that can go stale and becomes a fact about the filesystem — and gc
reconciles the links from the refs, which keeps the promise that derived state
can always be thrown away and rebuilt.

The alternatives were worse. A (repo, oid) table would have made the read path
depend on the index, so deleting data/index.db — which the roadmap promises
loses nothing — would have stopped LFS fetches until a rebuild. Namespacing
the storage itself would have cost the deduplication the store exists for.
Hard links give both: one copy of the bytes, one directory entry per
repository, and removing one repository's link leaves the other's data alone.

Three consequences that had to be handled rather than assumed:

- pre-receive checks pointers against the pushing repository, not the pool. A
  pointer to an object that exists only in another repository would otherwise
  pass the push and then 404 on clone. The client re-uploads, the pool
  deduplicates and the link lands, which is the transfer cost isolation
  implies.
- The sweep walks per repository, because reachability is per repository: an
  object reachable in one and not another keeps the first link and loses the
  second while the bytes stay. So `vole gc` is also the repair — it links what
  a repository reaches and unlinks what it no longer does.
- An instance upgrading from the shared pool has no namespaces at all, so
  every fetch would 404 until somebody read an upgrade note. server.New
  notices a store with no namespace and runs the link pass in the background
  once, using gc.Link — the half of gc that creates links and deletes nothing,
  so an interrupted pass leaves the store more reachable than it found it.
  A repository rename moves its namespace with it.

Reference counting stays rejected, and this makes the argument stronger: the
thing that repairs the store is the same walk that cleans it, and it cannot
invent a reference that does not exist.

Measured: TestAnObjectIsInvisibleToARepositoryThatDoesNotHoldIt and the server
level TestAnObjectIsNotFetchableThroughAnotherRepository (404 over the LFS
endpoint for an object the shared store demonstrably has);
TestTwoRepositoriesShareOneCopyOfTheBytes proves os.SameFile, so isolation
costs no deduplication; TestOneRepositoryLosingAPointerKeepsTheOthersLink and
TestLinkRepairsAMissingNamespace pin the per-repository sweep and the repair;
TestAnUnscopedStoreIsLinkedOnStartup covers the upgrade path.

Phase 5 is now complete: locking and object scoping both landed.

internal/server/artifacts_test.go +2−2

@@ -125,7 +125,7 @@ func TestRunArtifactsSurviveTheSweep(t *testing.T) {
125 125 t.Fatal(err)
126 126 }
127 127 res, err := gc.Run(gc.Options{
128 Repos: []string{filepath.Join(f.cfg.ReposDir(), f.repo+".git")},
128 Repos: []gc.Repo{{Name: f.repo, Dir: filepath.Join(f.cfg.ReposDir(), f.repo+".git")}},
129 129 Store: f.srv.LFS,
130 130 RunOIDs: oids,
131 131 Now: time.Now().Add(48 * time.Hour), // past every grace period
@@ -134,7 +134,7 @@ func TestRunArtifactsSurviveTheSweep(t *testing.T) {
134 134 t.Fatalf("gc: %v", err)
135 135 }
136 136 for _, a := range arts {
137 if !f.srv.LFS.Has(a.OID) {
137 if !f.srv.LFS.Has(f.repo, a.OID) {
138 138 t.Fatalf("gc swept run artifact %q (%+v)", a.Name, res)
139 139 }
140 140 }