Re: xfs: commit 6552321831dc "xfs: remove i_iolock and use i_rwsem in the VFS inode instead" change causes hang

[Mimi Zohar]

On Mon, 2017-01-09 at 14:44 -0500, Jeff Layton wrote:
> On Sun, 2017-01-08 at 20:09 +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 08, 2017 at 10:57:28AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > 
> > > I'm unsure about the DIO case, so lets try defining the semantics and
> > > see if they're implementable for DIO, otherwise simply exclude it.
> > 
> > Let's start with the semantics.  First we need to write down what
> > IMA requires from the FS, and have an interface how the FS can declare
> > that it supports these features.  As far as I can tell there are not
> > proper feature checks anywhere right now.  Once we have done that
> > we can move forward from there.
> > 
> > As you seem to be interested in IMA how about you spearhead documenting
> > the requirements and adding xfstests support?
> > 
> 
> Another datapoint here:
> 
> While doing the i_version rework patches, I noticed that IMA depends
> heavily on the filesystem correctly implementing the i_version counter,
> but that's only reliable for filesystems that set the MS_I_VERSION flag.
> 
> I see nowhere that IMA actually checks that that flag is set, so you can
> conceivably turn it on on filesystems that don't implement it correctly
> (or just have it turned off like ext4 defaults to) and never notice that
> your monitored file has changed.

Yes, the filesystem does need to be mounted with i_version for iMA to
detect file changes.

> Documenting the VFS and fs driver requirements for IMA would be a good
> way to start fixing some of these problems.

Agreed.

Mimi

> > > 
> > > OK, so how about we define it.  I think we need two vfs calls:
> > > 
> > > inode_block_local_writes(inode)
> > > inode_unblock_local_writes(inode)
> > 
> > No.  We need an ->ima_measure file_operation, guts of process_measurement
> > turned into a library function that the FS can call after taking fs-specific
> > locks.  And maybe also a small wrapper around it that takes ilock and
> > can be used directly for file systems not needing special locking.
> > 
> > > 
> > > With semantics that between these two, all write attempts to the file
> > > backed by the inode on this system block but reads of the underlying
> > > file are allowed (I added local so we don't have to implement for
> > > remote filesystems).
> > 
> > How do you define local?  Are GFS2 and OCFS2 local?  Is XFS with
> > outstanding pNFS layout local?  Is NFS with the block or SCSI layout
> > local because it operates on a block device?
> > 
> > The only sane way is to make INA opt-in with a check list of features
> > that need to be supported, and declared to be supported by the fs,
> > similar to how we handle NFS exporting.
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