Re: [RFC PATCH] getvalues(2) prototype

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 02:24:40PM +0100, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Mar 2022 at 12:43, Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org> wrote:
> 
> > Yes, we really need a way to query for various fs information. I'm a bit
> > torn about the details of this interface though. I would really like if
> > we had interfaces that are really easy to use from userspace comparable
> > to statx for example.
> 
> The reason I stated thinking about this is that Amir wanted a per-sb
> iostat interface and dumped it into /proc/PID/mountstats.  And that is
> definitely not the right way to go about this.
> 
> So we could add a statfsx() and start filling in new stuff, and that's
> what Linus suggested.  But then we might need to add stuff that is not
> representable in a flat structure (like for example the stuff that
> nfs_show_stats does) and that again needs new infrastructure.
> 
> Another example is task info in /proc.  Utilities are doing a crazy
> number of syscalls to get trivial information.  Why don't we have a
> procx(2) syscall?  I guess because lots of that is difficult to
> represent in a flat structure.  Just take the lsof example: tt's doing
> hundreds of thousands of syscalls on a desktop computer with just a
> few hundred processes.
> 
> So I'm trying to look beyond fsinfo and about how we could better
> retrieve attributes, statistics, small bits and pieces within a
> unified framework.
> 
> The ease of use argument does not really come into the picture here,
> because (unlike stat and friends) most of this info is specialized and
> will be either consumed by libraries, specialized utilities
> (util-linux, procos) or with a generic utility application that can
> query any information about anything that is exported through such an
> interface.    That applies to plain stat(2) as well: most users will
> not switch to statx() simply because that's too generic.  And that's
> fine, for info as common as struct stat a syscall is warranted.  If
> the info is more specialized, then I think a truly generic interface
> is a much better choice.
> 
> >  I know having this generic as possible was the
> > goal but I'm just a bit uneasy with such interfaces. They become
> > cumbersome to use in userspace. I'm not sure if the data: part for
> > example should be in this at all. That seems a bit out of place to me.
> 
> Good point, reduction of scope may help.
> 
> > Would it be really that bad if we added multiple syscalls for different
> > types of info? For example, querying mount information could reasonably
> > be a more focussed separate system call allowing to retrieve detailed
> > mount propagation info, flags, idmappings and so on. Prior approaches to
> > solve this in a completely generic way have gotten us not very far too
> > so I'm a bit worried about this aspect too.
> 
> And I fear that this will just result in more and more ad-hoc
> interfaces being added, because a new feature didn't quite fit the old
> API.  You can see the history of this happening all over the place
> with multiple new syscall versions being added as the old one turns
> out to be not generic enough.
> 
> I think a new interface needs to
> 
>   - be uniform (a single utility can be used to retrieve various
> attributes and statistics, contrast this with e.g. stat(1),
> getfattr(1), lsattr(1) not to mention various fs specific tools).
> 
>  - have a hierarchical namespace (the unix path lookup is an example
> of this that stood the test of time)
> 
>  - allow retrieving arbitrary text or binary data
> 
> And whatever form it takes, I'm sure it will be easier to use than the
> mess we currently have in various interfaces like the mount or process
> stats.

This has been proposed in the past a few times.  Most recently by the
KVM developers, which tried to create a "generic" api, but ended up just
making something to work for KVM as they got tired of people ignoring
their more intrusive patch sets.  See virt/kvm/binary_stats.c for what
they ended up with, and perhaps you can just use that same type of
interface here as well?

thanks,

greg k-h