Re: [PATCH 17/23] initramfs: switch initramfs unpacking to struct file based APIs

Linus Torvalds
2020-07-14T19:31:25Z

On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 12:09 PM Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> wrote:
>
> There is no good reason to mess with file descriptors from in-kernel
> code, switch the initramfs unpacking to struct file based write
> instead.

Looking at this diff, I realized this really should be cleaned up more.

+ wfile = filp_open(collected, openflags, mode);
> + if (IS_ERR(wfile))
> + return 0;
> +
> + vfs_fchown(wfile, uid, gid);
> + vfs_fchmod(wfile, mode);
> + if (body_len)
> + vfs_truncate(&wfile->f_path, body_len);
> + vcollected = kstrdup(collected, GFP_KERNEL);

That "vcollected" is ugly and broken, and seems oh-so-wrong.

Because it's only use is:

> - ksys_close(wfd);
> + fput(wfile);
> do_utime(vcollected, mtime);
> kfree(vcollected);

which should just have done the exact same thing that you did with
vfs_chown() and friends: we already have a "utimes_common()" that
takes a path, and it could have been made into "vfs_utimes()", and
then this whole vcollected confusion would go away and be replaced by

vfs_truncate(&wfile->f_path, mtime);

(ok, with all the "timespec64 t[2]" things going on that do_utime()
does now, but you get the idea).

Talk about de-crufting that initramfs unpacking..

But I don't hate this patch, I'm just pointing out that there's room
for improvement.

Linus