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Date:   Thu, 6 Apr 2023 09:37:53 +1000
From:   Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
To:     Eric Biggers <ebiggers@kernel.org>
Cc:     "Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@kernel.org>,
        Andrey Albershteyn <aalbersh@redhat.com>, dchinner@redhat.com,
        hch@infradead.org, linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org,
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        xiang@kernel.org, chao@kernel.org,
        damien.lemoal@opensource.wdc.com, jth@kernel.org,
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        linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, linux-f2fs-devel@lists.sourceforge.net,
        cluster-devel@redhat.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 21/23] xfs: handle merkle tree block size != fs
 blocksize != PAGE_SIZE
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On Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 10:54:06PM +0000, Eric Biggers wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 06, 2023 at 08:26:46AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > We could certainly think about moving to a design where fs/verity/ asks the
> > > filesystem to just *read* a Merkle tree block, without adding it to a cache, and
> > > then fs/verity/ implements the caching itself.  That would require some large
> > > changes to each filesystem, though, unless we were to double-cache the Merkle
> > > tree blocks which would be inefficient.
> > 
> > No, that's unnecessary.
> > 
> > All we need if for fsverity to require filesystems to pass it byte
> > addressable data buffers that are externally reference counted. The
> > filesystem can take a page reference before mapping the page and
> > passing the kaddr to fsverity, then unmap and drop the reference
> > when the merkle tree walk is done as per Andrey's new drop callout.
> > 
> > fsverity doesn't need to care what the buffer is made from, how it
> > is cached, what it's life cycle is, etc. The caching mechanism and
> > reference counting is entirely controlled by the filesystem callout
> > implementations, and fsverity only needs to deal with memory buffers
> > that are guaranteed to live for the entire walk of the merkle
> > tree....
> 
> Sure.  Just a couple notes:
> 
> First, fs/verity/ does still need to be able to tell whether the buffer is newly
> instantiated or not.

Boolean flag from the caller.

> Second, fs/verity/ uses the ahash API to do the hashing.  ahash is a
> scatterlist-based API.  Virtual addresses can still be used (see sg_set_buf()),
> but the memory cannot be vmalloc'ed memory, since virt_to_page() needs to work.
> Does XFS use vmalloc'ed memory for these buffers?

Not vmalloc'ed, but vmapped. we allocate the pages individually, but
then call vm_map_page() to present the higher level code with a
single contiguous memory range if it is a multi-page buffer.

We do have the backing info held in the buffer, and that's what we
use for IO. If fsverity needs a page based scatter/gather list
for hardware offload, it could ask the filesystem to provide it
for that given buffer...

> BTW, converting fs/verity/ from ahash to shash is an option; I've really never
> been a fan of the scatterlist-based crypto APIs!  The disadvantage of doing
> this, though, would be that it would remove support for all the hardware crypto
> drivers.
>
> That *might* actually be okay, as that approach to crypto acceleration
> has mostly fallen out of favor, in favor of CPU-based acceleration.  But I do
> worry about e.g. someone coming out of the woodwork and saying they need to use
> fsverity on a low-powered ARM board that has a crypto accelerator like CAAM, and
> they MUST use their crypto accelerator to get acceptable performance.

True, but we are very unlikely to be using XFS on such small
systems and I don't think we really care about XFS performance on
android sized systems, either.

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com