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

From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Mon Dec 17 2018 - 11:49:53 EST


On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 08:48:03PM -0800, Eric Biggers wrote:
> Sure, those specific people (modulo you just now) haven't responded to the
> fs-verity patches yet. But again, the patches have been out for review for
> months. Of course, we always prefer more reviews over fewer, and we strongly
> encourage anyone interested to review fs-verity! (The Documentation/ file may
> be a good place to start.) But ultimately we cannot force reviews, and as you
> know kernel reviews can be very hard to come by. Yet, people still need
> fs-verity anyway; it isn't just some toy. And we're committed to maintaining
> it, similar to fscrypt. The ext4 and f2fs maintainers are also satisfied with
> the current approach to storing the verity metadata past EOF; in fact it was
> even originally Ted's idea, I think.

But you also can't force inclusion. And Linus just recently complained
about merging common code patches through trees for a specific fs
without proper VFS ACKs. And that was a for a case without userspace
ABI implications, so we really need a much better review here.

Including a VFS person ACK, CC to linux-abi and man pages for the
interface.

> > Given that you alread use an ioctl as the interface what is the problem
> > of passing this data through the ioctl?
>
> Do you mean pass the verity metadata in a buffer? That cannot work in general,
> because it may be too large to fit into memory.

Have a pointer in the ioctl and do get_user_pages on it.