Re: [PATCH v1 1/5] hostfs: Fix ephemeral inodes

Richard Weinberger
2023-05-21T21:14:13Z

----- Ursprüngliche Mail -----
> Von: "Mickaël Salaün" <mic@digikod.net>
> hostfs creates a new inode for each opened or created file, which created
> useless inode allocations and forbade identifying a host file with a kernel
> inode.
>
> Fix this uncommon filesystem behavior by tying kernel inodes to host
> file's inode and device IDs. Even if the host filesystem inodes may be
> recycled, this cannot happen while a file referencing it is open, which
> is the case with hostfs. It should be noted that hostfs inode IDs may
> not be unique for the same hostfs superblock because multiple host's
> (backed) superblocks may be used.
>
> Delete inodes when dropping them to force backed host's file descriptors
> closing.
>
> This enables to entirely remove ARCH_EPHEMERAL_INODES, and then makes
> Landlock fully supported by UML. This is very useful for testing
> (ongoing and backported) changes.

Removing ARCH_EPHEMERAL_INODES should be a patch on its own, IMHO.

> These changes also factor out and simplify some helpers thanks to the
> new hostfs_inode_update() and the hostfs_iget() revamp: read_name(),
> hostfs_create(), hostfs_lookup(), hostfs_mknod(), and
> hostfs_fill_sb_common().
>
> A following commit with new Landlock tests check this new hostfs inode
> consistency.
>
> Cc: Anton Ivanov <anton.ivanov@cambridgegreys.com>
> Cc: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
> Cc: Richard Weinberger <richard@nod.at>
> Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> # 5.15.x: ce72750f04d6: hostfs: Fix writeback of
> dirty pages
> Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> # 5.15+

I'm not sure whether this patch qualifies as stable material.
While I fully agree that the current behavoir is odd, nothing user visible
is really broken so far.

> Signed-off-by: Mickaël Salaün <mic@digikod.net>
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230309165455.175131-2-mic@digikod.net

Other than that, patch looks good to me.

Thanks,
//richard