btrfs: introduce new ioctl to unregister a btrfs device

Support for a new command that can be used eg. as a command

  $ btrfs device scan --forget [dev]'
(the final name may change though)

to undo the effects of 'btrfs device scan [dev]'. For this purpose
this patch proposes to use ioctl #5 as it was empty and is next to the
SCAN ioctl.

The new ioctl BTRFS_IOC_FORGET_DEV works only on the control device
(/dev/btrfs-control) to unregister one or all devices, devices that are
not mounted.

The argument is struct btrfs_ioctl_vol_args, ::name specifies the device
path. To unregister all device, the path is an empty string.

Again, the devices are removed only if they aren't part of a mounte
filesystem.

This new ioctl provides:

- release of unwanted btrfs_fs_devices and btrfs_devices structures
  from memory if the device is not going to be mounted

- ability to mount filesystem in degraded mode, when one devices is
  corrupted like in split brain raid1

- running test cases which would require reloading the kernel module
  but this is not possible eg. due to mounted filesystem or built-in

Signed-off-by: Anand Jain <anand.jain@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
[ update changelog ]
Signed-off-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/uapi/linux/btrfs.h b/include/uapi/linux/btrfs.h
index e0763bc4158e..c195896d478f 100644
--- a/include/uapi/linux/btrfs.h
+++ b/include/uapi/linux/btrfs.h
@@ -837,6 +837,8 @@ enum btrfs_err_code {
 				   struct btrfs_ioctl_vol_args)
 #define BTRFS_IOC_SCAN_DEV _IOW(BTRFS_IOCTL_MAGIC, 4, \
 				   struct btrfs_ioctl_vol_args)
+#define BTRFS_IOC_FORGET_DEV _IOW(BTRFS_IOCTL_MAGIC, 5, \
+				   struct btrfs_ioctl_vol_args)
 /* trans start and trans end are dangerous, and only for
  * use by applications that know how to avoid the
  * resulting deadlocks