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+
+# scoutfs Engineering Compendium
+
+-----
+
+## Document Overview
+
+This document is intended to be a relatively unstructured but thorough
+coverage of the design, implementation, and deployment of scoutfs.
+
+*Not Yet Discussed: repair, dump/restore, remote namespace
+synchronization, compression, encryption, trim, dedup, hole punching,
+SMR, iops v. bw, range locking, sorting keys by type/inode, enospc,
+compaction priority, manifest server, manifest network protocol, inode
+allocation, clustered open-unlink, seq queries, offline data, LSM,
+forward/back compat.*
+
+## Raison D'être
+
+scoutfs is an archival posix file system.  It's built to provide a posix
+interface to petabytes of data in trillions of files through thousands
+of nodes.
+
+scoutfs uses log-structured merge trees to achieve high operation
+throughput with low device command rates.  It uses ranged locking to
+maintain consistent POSIX semantics amongst clustered nodes with minimum
+synchronization overhead.  It offers additional metadata indexing and
+data residency interfaces for efficiently executing archival policies.
+It is deployed on a shared block fabric for high bandwidth and low
+latency.
+
+## Indexing Inodes by Modification Time
+
+As files are modified archival agents need to find these modified files
+so that the archive can be updated.  As inode counts explode it becomes
+infeasible to scan the entire inode population and meet archival
+deadlines.
+
+scoutfs maintains an index of inodes by modification time.  An ioctl is
+offered which iterates over the inodes in the order that they were
+modified.  The ioctl takes a timespec cursor from which to walk.  It
+fills a buffer with inodes and the time they were modified, sorted by
+time.
+
+The ioctl results are inherently racey.  There's nothing to stop an
+inode from being modified and moved in the index between when the call
+returns and the caller operates on the inode.
+
+This index is maintained by having time fields in the inode and
+modification time items at those time values.  The item key sorts the
+items by time for the ioctl to iterate over.  The items have no value.
+
+	.type = SCOUTFS_MODTIME_KEY,
+	.ino = inode,
+	.ts.tv_sec = seconds,
+	.ts.tv_nsec = nanoseconds,
+
+As inodes are modified deletion items are created for the old time and
+new items are inserted.  LSM's ability to let us create items without
+strictly locking their key value keeps these items from creating
+unacceptable lock contention.  If the modifying task has sufficient
+locking on the inode it can modify these items and LSM will eventually
+merge them into place.
+
+The index is keyed on real world time so that we don't have to create
+our own consistent advancing clock.  The clock only needs to be as
+accurate as the users of the index require (this often doesn't add
+unreasonable requirements, it's often already the case that arhicval
+policies involve time and motivate a reasonably synchronized clock
+across the cluster.)
+
+As inodes are deleted their modification items are deleted.
+
+> *XXX Need to figure out how to resolve multiple items created by
+> concurrent writers.  We want concurrent parallel writers, say, and
+> they'll all way to create their own items at their write times.  We'd
+> need to be able to find those to delete them during future
+> modification or deletion.  Sort of sounds like we want
+> per-node-identity backrefs for each to maintain and to purge as nodes
+> leave the cluster.