Re: [PATCH v5 06/24] fsverity: pass tree_blocksize to end_enable_verity()

David Hildenbrand
2024-03-12T15:33:21Z

On 12.03.24 16:13, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 11.03.24 23:38, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
>> [add willy and linux-mm]
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 08:40:17PM -0800, Eric Biggers wrote:
>>> On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 07:46:50PM -0800, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
>>>>> BTW, is xfs_repair planned to do anything about any such extra blocks?
>>>>
>>>> Sorry to answer your question with a question, but how much checking is
>>>> $filesystem expected to do for merkle trees?
>>>>
>>>> In theory xfs_repair could learn how to interpret the verity descriptor,
>>>> walk the merkle tree blocks, and even read the file data to confirm
>>>> intactness. If the descriptor specifies the highest block address then
>>>> we could certainly trim off excess blocks. But I don't know how much of
>>>> libfsverity actually lets you do that; I haven't looked into that
>>>> deeply. :/
>>>>
>>>> For xfs_scrub I guess the job is theoretically simpler, since we only
>>>> need to stream reads of the verity files through the page cache and let
>>>> verity tell us if the file data are consistent.
>>>>
>>>> For both tools, if something finds errors in the merkle tree structure
>>>> itself, do we turn off verity? Or do we do something nasty like
>>>> truncate the file?
>>>
>>> As far as I know (I haven't been following btrfs-progs, but I'm familiar with
>>> e2fsprogs and f2fs-tools), there isn't yet any precedent for fsck actually
>>> validating the data of verity inodes against their Merkle trees.
>>>
>>> e2fsck does delete the verity metadata of inodes that don't have the verity flag
>>> enabled. That handles cleaning up after a crash during FS_IOC_ENABLE_VERITY.
>>>
>>> I suppose that ideally, if an inode's verity metadata is invalid, then fsck
>>> should delete that inode's verity metadata and remove the verity flag from the
>>> inode. Checking for a missing or obviously corrupt fsverity_descriptor would be
>>> fairly straightforward, but it probably wouldn't catch much compared to actually
>>> validating the data against the Merkle tree. And actually validating the data
>>> against the Merkle tree would be complex and expensive. Note, none of this
>>> would work on files that are encrypted.
>>>
>>> Re: libfsverity, I think it would be possible to validate a Merkle tree using
>>> libfsverity_compute_digest() and the callbacks that it supports. But that's not
>>> quite what it was designed for.
>>>
>>>> Is there an ioctl or something that allows userspace to validate an
>>>> entire file's contents? Sort of like what BLKVERIFY would have done for
>>>> block devices, except that we might believe its answers?
>>>
>>> Just reading the whole file and seeing whether you get an error would do it.
>>>
>>> Though if you want to make sure it's really re-reading the on-disk data, it's
>>> necessary to drop the file's pagecache first.
>>
>> I tried a straight pagecache read and it worked like a charm!
>>
>> But then I thought to myself, do I really want to waste memory bandwidth
>> copying a bunch of data? No. I don't even want to incur system call
>> overhead from reading a single byte every $pagesize bytes.
>>
>> So I created 2M mmap areas and read a byte every $pagesize bytes. That
>> worked too, insofar as SIGBUSes are annoying to handle. But it's
>> annoying to take signals like that.
>>
>> Then I started looking at madvise. MADV_POPULATE_READ looked exactly
>> like what I wanted -- it prefaults in the pages, and "If populating
>> fails, a SIGBUS signal is not generated; instead, an error is returned."
>>
>
> Yes, these were the expected semantics :)
>
>> But then I tried rigging up a test to see if I could catch an EIO, and
>> instead I had to SIGKILL the process! It looks filemap_fault returns
>> VM_FAULT_RETRY to __xfs_filemap_fault, which propagates up through
>> __do_fault -> do_read_fault -> do_fault -> handle_pte_fault ->
>> handle_mm_fault -> faultin_page -> __get_user_pages. At faultin_pages,
>> the VM_FAULT_RETRY is translated to -EBUSY.
>>
>> __get_user_pages squashes -EBUSY to 0, so faultin_vma_page_range returns
>> that to madvise_populate. Unfortunately, madvise_populate increments
>> its loop counter by the return value (still 0) so it runs in an
>> infinite loop. The only way out is SIGKILL.
>
> That's certainly unexpected. One user I know is QEMU, which primarily
> uses MADV_POPULATE_WRITE to prefault page tables. Prefaulting in QEMU is
> primarily used with shmem/hugetlb, where I haven't heard of any such
> endless loops.
>
>>
>> So I don't know what the correct behavior is here, other than the
>> infinite loop seems pretty suspect. Is it the correct behavior that
>> madvise_populate returns EIO if __get_user_pages ever returns zero?
>> That doesn't quite sound right if it's the case that a zero return could
>> also happen if memory is tight.
>
> madvise_populate() ends up calling faultin_vma_page_range() in a loop.
> That one calls __get_user_pages().
>
> __get_user_pages() documents: "0 return value is possible when the fault
> would need to be retried."
>
> So that's what the caller does. IIRC, there are cases where we really
> have to retry (at least once) and will make progress, so treating "0" as
> an error would be wrong.
>
> Staring at other __get_user_pages() users, __get_user_pages_locked()
> documents: "Please note that this function, unlike __get_user_pages(),
> will not return 0 for nr_pages > 0, unless FOLL_NOWAIT is used.".
>
> But there is some elaborate retry logic in there, whereby the retry will
> set FOLL_TRIED->FAULT_FLAG_TRIED, and I think we'd fail on the second
> retry attempt (there are cases where we retry more often, but that's
> related to something else I believe).
>
> So maybe we need a similar retry logic in faultin_vma_page_range()? Or
> make it use __get_user_pages_locked(), but I recall when I introduced
> MADV_POPULATE_READ, there was a catch to it.

I'm trying to figure out who will be setting the VM_FAULT_SIGBUS in the
mmap()+access case you describe above.

Staring at arch/x86/mm/fault.c:do_user_addr_fault(), I don't immediately
see how we would transition from a VM_FAULT_RETRY loop to
VM_FAULT_SIGBUS. Because VM_FAULT_SIGBUS would be required for that
function to call do_sigbus().

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb