Re: [PATCH] vfs: move ACL cache lookup into generic code

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 07:34:43PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Comments on this part? It's untested, but it's a very straightforward 
> conversion of my previous patch (that I did test).

Looks fine and I'm OK with applying and throwing into the next pull request, 
but...

> +	 * Under RCU walk, we cannot even do a "get_cached_acl()",
> +	 * because that involves locking and getting a refcount on
> +	 * a cached ACL.

... why is that a problem?  Locking there is mere ->i_lock and getting
a refcount is atomic_inc().  Grabbing a reference might be Not Nice from
the cacheline bouncing POV, but...

IIRC, these suckers (in-core ones) are copy-on-write.  If so we should be
reasonably safe here.  We obviously have no business trying to get ACL
from fs if it's not cached, but other than that...

Mind you, if they *are* C-O-W, we could do freeing them via RCU and avoid
even bothering with reference...

<checks> oh, my...  All callers of posix_acl_chmod_masq() have exactly the
same form:
	clone = posix_acl_clone(acl, some_flags);
	if (clone)
		error = -ENOMEM;
		sod off
	posix_acl_release(acl);
	error = posix_acl_chmod_masq(clone, mode);
	if (error)
		posix_acl_release(clone);
		sod off
	do something useful
Sounds like a really dumb API to me...

They are C-O-W, all right.  With too low-level helpers exposed...

posix_acl_create_masq(): same story, apparently.  Whee...  on ocfs2:
                clone = posix_acl_clone(acl, GFP_NOFS);
                ret = -ENOMEM;
                if (!clone)
                        goto cleanup;

                mode = inode->i_mode;
                ret = posix_acl_create_masq(clone, &mode);
                if (ret >= 0) {
                        ret2 = ocfs2_acl_set_mode(inode, di_bh, handle, mode);
                        if (ret2) {
                                mlog_errno(ret2);
                                ret = ret2;
                                goto cleanup;
	...
cleanup:
        posix_acl_release(acl);
        return ret;

Leaks'R'Us...

OK, unless there are serious objections, I
	* apply Linus' patch as-is
	* fix that ocfs2 leak
	* replace posix_acl_..._masq() with saner helpers (take original
acl + other arguments, return modified clone or ERR_PTR) and kill open-coded
instances...