On Tue, Jul 22, 2025 at 02:57:06PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote: > Hey, > > This is a POC. We're still discussing alternatives and I want to provide > some useful data on what I learned about using offsets to drop fscrypt > and fsverity from struct inode. > > As discussed, this moves the fscrypt and fsverity pointers out of struct > inode shrinking it by 16 bytes. The pointers move into the individual > filesystems that actually do make use of them. > > In order to find the fscrypt and fsverity data pointers offsets from the > embedded struct inode in the filesystem's private inode data are > stored in struct inode_operations. This means we get fast access to the > data pointers without having to rely on indirect calls. > > Bugs & Issues > ============= > > * For fscrypt specifically the biggest issue is > fscrypt_prepare_new_inode() is called in filesystem's inode allocation > functions before inode->i_op is set. That means the offset isn't > available at the time when we would need it. To fix this we can set > dummy encrypted inode operations for the respective filesystem with an > initialized offset. > > * For both fscrypt & fsverity the biggest issue is that every codepath > that currently calls make_bad_inode() after having initialized fscrypt > or fsverity data will override inode->i_op with bad_inode_ops. At > which point we're back to the previous problem: The offset isn't > available anymore. So when inode->i_sb->s_op->evict_inode() is called > fscrypt_put_encryption_info() doesn't have the offset available > anymore and would corrupt the hell out of everything and also leak > memory. > > Obviously we could use a flag to detect a bad inodes instead of i_op > and let the filesystem assign it's own bad inode operations including > the correct offset. Is it worth it? > > The other way I see we can fix this if we require fixed offsets in the > filesystems inode so fscrypt and fsverity always now what offset to > calculate. We could use two consecutive pointers at the beginning of > the filesystem's inode. Does that always work and is it worth it?
Another, way less idiotic but way more obvious solution is to move the offsets to struct super_operations. That will mean one additional pointer deref but it will have the big advantage that the patch will become really really simple. Thoughts? Otherwise I'd implement that.
