Re: [PATCH v2 01/12] fs-verity: add a documentation file

Theodore Y. Ts'o
2018-12-19T00:16:14Z

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 12:00:39PM -0800, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> FWIW, if I were (hypothetically) working on an xfs implementation, I
> likely would have settled on passing a reference to a merkle tree
> through a (fd, length) pair, because that allows us plenty of options
> on the back end:
>
> b) we could remap the tree into a new inode fork for merkle trees, or
> a) remap it as posteof blocks like ext4/f2fs does, or
> c) remap the blocks into the attribute fork as an (unusually large)
> extended attribute value.

Sure, but what would be the benefit of doing different things on the
back end? I think this is a really more of a philophical objection
than anything else. With both fsverity and fscrypt, well over 95% of
the implementation is shared between ext4 and f2fs. And from a
cryptographic design, that's something I consider a feature, not a
bug. Cryptographic code is subtle in very different ways compared to
file system code. So it's a good thing to having it done once and
audited by crypto specialists, as opposed to having each file system
doing it differently / independently.

> If the merkle_fd isn't on the same filesystem as the fd we could at
> least use generic_copy_file_range (i.e. page cache copying) to land the
> merkle tree wherever we want.
>
> Granted, it's not like we can't do any of those three things given the
> current interface. I gather most of the grumbling has to do with
> feeling like we're associating the on-disk format to the ioctl interface
> too closely?

Right, the current interface makes it somewhat more awkward to do
these other things --- but the question is *why* would you want to in
the first place? Why add the extra complexity? I'm a big believer of
the KISS principle, and if there was a reason why a file system would
want to store the Merkle tree somewhere else, we could talk about it,
but I see only downside, and no upside.

- Ted