Accessing SuperBlock object of linux kernel in a system call - linux-kernel

Question

I am trying to access super block object which is defined in linux/fs.h.
But how to initialize the object so that we can access it's properties.
I found that alloc_super() is used to initialize super but how is it called?
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <linux/fs.h>
int main(){
printf("hello there");
struct super_block *sb;
return 0;
}

Answer 1

The answer is very much file system dependent, since different file systems will have different super block layouts and infact different arrangements of blocks.
For instance, ext2 file systems superblock is in a known location on disk (byte 1024), and has a known size (sizeof(struct superblock) bytes).
So a typical implementation (This is not a working code but with minor modification can be made to work ) of what you want would be:
struct superblock *read_superblock(int fd) {
struct superblock *sb = malloc(sizeof(struct superblock));
assert(sb != NULL);
lseek(fd, (off_t) 1024, SEEK_SET));
read(fd, (void *) sb, sizeof(struct superblock));
return sb;
}
Now, you can alloc superblock using linux/headers, or write your own struct that exactly matches with the ext2/ext3/etc/etc file systems superblock.
Then you must know where to find the superblock (the lseek() comes here).
Also you need to pass the disk file name file_descriptor to the function.
So do a
int fd = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY);
struct superblock * sb = read_superblock(fd);