Re: [PATCH v3 2/2] vfs: avoid duplicating creds in faccessat if possible

[Mateusz Guzik <mjguzik@gmail.com>]

On 3/2/23, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 02, 2023 at 07:14:24PM +0100, Mateusz Guzik wrote:
>> On 3/2/23, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>> > On Thu, Mar 2, 2023 at 12:30 AM Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Fwiw, as long as you, Al, and others are fine with it and I'm aware of
>> >> it I'm happy to pick up more stuff like this. I've done it before and
>> >> have worked in this area so I'm happy to help with some of the load.
>> >
>> > Yeah, that would work. We've actually had discussions of vfs
>> > maintenance in general.
>> >
>> > In this case it really wasn't an issue, with this being just two
>> > fairly straightforward patches for code that I was familiar with.
>> >
>>
>> Well on that note I intend to write a patch which would add a flag to
>> the dentry cache.
>>
>> There is this thing named CONFIG_INIT_ON_ALLOC_DEFAULT_ON which is
>> enabled at least on debian, ubuntu and arch. It results in mandatory
>> memset on the obj before it gets returned from kmalloc, for hardening
>> purposes.
>>
>> Now the problem is that dentry cache allocates bufs 4096 bytes in
>> size, so this is an equivalent of a clear_page call and it happens
>> *every time* there is a path lookup.
>
> Huh?  Quite a few path lookups don't end up allocating any dentries;
> what exactly are you talking about?
>

Ops, I meant "names_cache", here:
	names_cachep = kmem_cache_create_usercopy("names_cache", PATH_MAX, 0,
			SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN|SLAB_PANIC, 0, PATH_MAX, NULL);

it is fs/dcache.c and I brainfarted into the above.

>> Given how dentry cache is used, I'm confident there is 0 hardening
>> benefit for it.
>>
>> So the plan would be to add a flag on cache creation to exempt it from
>> the mandatory memset treatment and use it with dentry.
>>
>> I don't have numbers handy but as you can imagine it gave me a nice bump
>> :)
>>
>> Whatever you think about the idea aside, the q is: can something like
>> the above go in without Al approving it?
>
> That one I would really like to take a look at.
>

allright

-- 
Mateusz Guzik <mjguzik gmail.com>