Re: [PATCH v4 0/3] ovl: Add support for fs-verity checking of lowerdata

[Eric Biggers <ebiggers@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2023 at 12:15:15PM +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> This series depends on the commit
>   fsverity: rework fsverity_get_digest() again
> Which is in the "for-next" branch of 
>   https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/fsverity/linux.git/
> 
> This series, plus the above commit are also in git here:
>   https://github.com/alexlarsson/linux/tree/overlay-verity
> 
> I would love to see this go into 6.5. So Eric, could you maybe Ack the
> implementation patches separately from the documentation patches? Then
> maybe we can get this in early, and I promise to try to get the
> documentation up to standard during the 6.5 cycle as needed.

I think it's gotten too late for 6.5.  If there is no 6.4-rc8, then the 6.5
merge window will open just 5 days from now.  This series has recently gone
through some significant changes, including in the version just sent out today
which I haven't had a chance to review yet.

Please don't try to rush things in when they involve UAPI and on-disk format
changes, which will have to be supported forever.  We need to take the time to
get them right.
 
I also see that the overlayfs tree is already very busy in 6.5, with the support
for data-only lower layers, lazy lookup of lowerdata, and the new mount API.

I think 6.6 would be a more realistic target.  That would give time to write
proper documentation as well, which is super important.  (Very often while
writing documentation, I realize that I should do something differently in the
code.  Please don't think of documentation as something can be done "later".)

- Eric