Re: [PATCH RFC 12/29] fsverity: expose merkle tree geometry to callers

Christoph Hellwig
2025-08-11T11:48:18Z

On Mon, Jul 28, 2025 at 10:30:16PM +0200, Andrey Albershteyn wrote:
> From: "Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@kernel.org>
>
> Create a function that will return selected information about the
> geometry of the merkle tree. Online fsck for XFS will need this piece
> to perform basic checks of the merkle tree.

Just curious, why does xfs need this, but the existing file systems
don't? That would be some good background information for the commit
message.

> + if (!IS_VERITY(inode))
> + return -ENODATA;
> +
> + error = ensure_verity_info(inode);
> + if (error)
> + return error;
> +
> + vi = inode->i_verity_info;

Wouldn't it be a better interface to return the verity_ino from
ensure_verity_info (NULL for !IS_VERITY, ERR_PTR for real error)
and then just look at the fields directly?