# Copyright (C) 2010-2014 Junjiro R. Okajima

Dynamically customizable FS operations
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Generally FS operations (struct inode_operations, struct
address_space_operations, struct file_operations, etc.) are defined as
"static const", but it never means that FS have only one set of
operation. Some FS have multiple sets of them. For instance, ext2 has
three sets, one for XIP, for NOBH, and for normal.
Since aufs overrides and redirects these operations, sometimes aufs has
to change its behaviour according to the branch FS type. More imporantly
VFS acts differently if a function (member in the struct) is set or
not. It means aufs should have several sets of operations and select one
among them according to the branch FS definition.

In order to solve this problem and not to affect the behavour of VFS,
aufs defines these operations dynamically. For instance, aufs defines
aio_read function for struct file_operations, but it may not be set to
the file_operations. When the branch FS doesn't have it, aufs doesn't
set it to its file_operations while the function definition itself is
still alive. So the behaviour of io_submit(2) will not change, and it
will return an error when aio_read is not defined.

The lifetime of these dynamically generated operation object is
maintained by aufs branch object. When the branch is removed from aufs,
the reference counter of the object is decremented. When it reaches
zero, the dynamically generated operation object will be freed.

This approach is designed to support AIO (io_submit), Direcit I/O and
XIP mainly.
Currently this approach is applied to file_operations and
vm_operations_struct for regular files only.