Re: xfs: commit 6552321831dc "xfs: remove i_iolock and use i_rwsem in the VFS inode instead" change causes hang

Jeff Layton
2017-01-09T19:45:02Z

On Sun, 2017-01-08 at 20:09 +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 08, 2017 at 10:57:28AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> >
> > I'm unsure about the DIO case, so lets try defining the semantics and
> > see if they're implementable for DIO, otherwise simply exclude it.
>
> Let's start with the semantics. First we need to write down what
> IMA requires from the FS, and have an interface how the FS can declare
> that it supports these features. As far as I can tell there are not
> proper feature checks anywhere right now. Once we have done that
> we can move forward from there.
>
> As you seem to be interested in IMA how about you spearhead documenting
> the requirements and adding xfstests support?
>

Another datapoint here:

While doing the i_version rework patches, I noticed that IMA depends
heavily on the filesystem correctly implementing the i_version counter,
but that's only reliable for filesystems that set the MS_I_VERSION flag.

I see nowhere that IMA actually checks that that flag is set, so you can
conceivably turn it on on filesystems that don't implement it correctly
(or just have it turned off like ext4 defaults to) and never notice that
your monitored file has changed.

Documenting the VFS and fs driver requirements for IMA would be a good
way to start fixing some of these problems.

> >
> > OK, so how about we define it. I think we need two vfs calls:
> >
> > inode_block_local_writes(inode)
> > inode_unblock_local_writes(inode)
>
> No. We need an ->ima_measure file_operation, guts of process_measurement
> turned into a library function that the FS can call after taking fs-specific
> locks. And maybe also a small wrapper around it that takes ilock and
> can be used directly for file systems not needing special locking.
>
> >
> > With semantics that between these two, all write attempts to the file
> > backed by the inode on this system block but reads of the underlying
> > file are allowed (I added local so we don't have to implement for
> > remote filesystems).
>
> How do you define local? Are GFS2 and OCFS2 local? Is XFS with
> outstanding pNFS layout local? Is NFS with the block or SCSI layout
> local because it operates on a block device?
>
> The only sane way is to make INA opt-in with a check list of features
> that need to be supported, and declared to be supported by the fs,
> similar to how we handle NFS exporting.
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--
Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>