TL;DR
No. At least using more-or-less default configuration at the time of writing.
Logging the usage of O_DIRECT
flag
We can use the bpftrace tool to intercept open
syscalls (and all its variants on the architecture we are testing). There is even an example if a similar use-case - opensnoop.bt. However, it does not fit our needs as it does not say whether O_DIRECT
was used. So I wrote something similar:
struct open_how {
unsigned long long flags;
}
kprobe:do_sys_openat2 {
printf("%12lld %-16s %-16s %s\n",
pid,
comm,
(((struct open_how *)arg2)->flags & 65536 == 65536)
? "O_DIRECT" : "",
str(arg1)
)
}
I won't go into detail on how exactly does the bpftrace script work. If you want to learn about scripting bpftrace
, see the reference guide.
How did I end up with this exactly this script? The first important thing to note is that I am running the tests on aarch64 system. Therefore, the only open
-like syscall we have is openat2
, there are no other syscalls with similar meaning as they were all replaced by openat2
. And because openat2
passes arguments using a pointer to a struct, we have to parse it. That's why there is a struct definition at the top of the script. Second, the maagic value 65536 corresponds to the value of the O_DIRECT
flag on the aarch64 platform. To find out what the value is, we can print it out using Python:
python -c "import os; print(os.O_DIRECT)"
Output from the script might then look like this (modified for brevity):
28805 fish /
28805 fish /etc
30373 cat /etc/ld.so.preload
30373 cat /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libarmmem-v8l.so
30373 cat /etc/ld.so.cache
30373 cat /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libc.so.6
30373 cat /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
30373 cat /etc/passwd
28805 fish O_DIRECT /home/vasek/.local/share/fish/fish_history
Opening file with O_DIRECT
for test
To open a file with O_DIRECT
flag, we can use something like this:
dd if=/dev/zero count=1 bs=16 of=outfile oflag=direct
When we run in, the bpftrace script prints out this:
675 dd O_DIRECT outfile
The actual test
With the tools we prepared, testing whether O_DIRECT
propagates over the network filesystems is simple. I tried mounting the disk using all of these commands:
sudo mount -t cifs -o user=vasek //server/vasek /mnt/vasek
sudo mount -t smb3 -o user=vasek //server/vasek /mnt/vasek
sudo mount -t cifs -o user=vasek,cache=none //server/vasek /mnt/vasek
sudo mount -t smb3 -o user=vasek,cache=none //server/vasek /mnt/vasek
And with all of these, the bpftrace script printed out something like this:
24447 smbd outfile
So, we haven't seen the O_DIRECT flag propagated over the network.
Server config
And just for completeness, the config used for smbd was the following. Everything else was left as a default based on the distro's package.
[vasek]
path = /mnt/biggadisk/vasek
writeable=Yes
create mask=0777
directory mask=0777
public=no