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

Christoph Hellwig
2018-12-19T07:14:24Z

On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 07:16:03PM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> 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.

Where the data is located on disk should not matter for the crypto
details. If it does you have severe implementation issues.

> 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.

Filesystems already use blocks beyond EOF for preallocation, either
speculative by the file system itself, or explicitly by the user with
fallocate. I bet you will run into bugs with your creative abuse
sooner or later. Indepnd of that the interface simply is gross, which
is enough of a reason not to merge it.