Re: [PATCH v6 2/3] btrfs: initial fsverity support

[Eric Biggers <ebiggers@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 10:49:33AM -0700, Boris Burkov wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 10:32:59AM -0700, Eric Biggers wrote:
> > Hi Boris,
> > 
> > On Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 01:01:49PM -0700, Boris Burkov wrote:
> > > Add support for fsverity in btrfs. To support the generic interface in
> > > fs/verity, we add two new item types in the fs tree for inodes with
> > > verity enabled. One stores the per-file verity descriptor and btrfs
> > > verity item and the other stores the Merkle tree data itself.
> > > 
> > > Verity checking is done in end_page_read just before a page is marked
> > > uptodate. This naturally handles a variety of edge cases like holes,
> > > preallocated extents, and inline extents. Some care needs to be taken to
> > > not try to verity pages past the end of the file, which are accessed by
> > > the generic buffered file reading code under some circumstances like
> > > reading to the end of the last page and trying to read again. Direct IO
> > > on a verity file falls back to buffered reads.
> > > 
> > > Verity relies on PageChecked for the Merkle tree data itself to avoid
> > > re-walking up shared paths in the tree. For this reason, we need to
> > > cache the Merkle tree data. Since the file is immutable after verity is
> > > turned on, we can cache it at an index past EOF.
> > > 
> > > Use the new inode ro_flags to store verity on the inode item, so that we
> > > can enable verity on a file, then rollback to an older kernel and still
> > > mount the file system and read the file. Since we can't safely write the
> > > file anymore without ruining the invariants of the Merkle tree, we mark
> > > a ro_compat flag on the file system when a file has verity enabled.
> > 
> > I want to mention the btrfs verity support in
> > Documentation/filesystems/fsverity.rst, and I have a couple questions:
> > 
> > 1. Is the ro_compat filesystem flag still a thing?  The commit message claims it
> >    is, and BTRFS_FEATURE_COMPAT_RO_VERITY is defined in the code, but it doesn't
> >    seem to actually be used.  It's not needed since you found a way to make the
> >    inode flags ro_compat instead, right?
> 
> I believe it is still being used, unless I messed up the patch I sent in
> the end. Taking a quick look, I think it's set at fs/btrfs/verity.c:558.
> 
> btrfs_set_fs_compat_ro(root->fs_info, VERITY);
> 
> I believe I still needed it because the tree checker doesn't scan every
> inode on the filesystem when you mount, so it would only freak out about
> a ro-compat inode later on if the inode didn't happen to be in a leaf
> that was being checked at mount time.
> 

Okay, so it is used.  (Due to the macro, it didn't show up when grepping.)

Doesn't it defeat the purpose of a ro_compat inode flag if the whole filesystem
is marked with a ro_compat feature flag, though?  I thought that the point of
the ro_compat inode flag is to allow old kernels to mount the filesystem
read-write, with only verity files being forced to read-only.  That would be
more flexible than ext4's implementation of fs-verity which forces the whole
filesystem to read-only.  But it seems you're forcing the whole filesystem to
read-only anyway?

- Eric