Date:	Mon, 7 Sep 2009 14:01:14 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
	Linux Filesystem Mailing List <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>
cc:	Eric Paris <eparis@...hat.com>, Mimi Zohar <zohar@...ibm.com>,
	James Morris <jmorris@...ei.org>
Subject: [PATCH 0/8] VFS name lookup permission checking cleanup


This is a series of eight trivial patches that I'd like people to take a 
look at, because I am hoping to eventually do multiple path component 
lookups in one go without taking the per-dentry lock or incrementing (and 
then decrementing) the per-dentry atomic count for each component.

The aim would be to try to avoid getting that annoying cacheline ping-pong 
on the common top-level dentries that everybody looks up (ie root and home 
directories, /usr, /usr/bin etc).

Right now I have some simple (but real) loads that show the contention on 
dentry->d_lock to be a roughly 3% performance hit on a single-socket 
nehalem, and I assume it can be much worse on multi-socket machines.

And the thing is, it should be entirely possible to do everything but the 
last component lookup with just a single read_seqbegin()/read_seqretry() 
around the whole lookup. Yes, the last component is special and absolutely 
needs locking and counting - but the last component also doesn't tend to 
be shared, so locking it is fine.

Now, I may never actually get there, but when looking at it, the biggest 
problem is actually not so much the path lookup itself, as the security 
tests that are done for each path component. And it should be noted that 
in order for a lockless seq-lock only lookup make sense, any such 
operations would have to be totally lock-free too. They certainly can't 
take mutexes etc, but right now they do.

Those security tests fall into two categories:

 - actual security layer callouts: ima_path_check().

   This one looks totally pointless. Path component lookup is a horribly 
   timing-critical path, and we will only do a successful lookup on a 
   directory (inode needs to have a ->lookup operation), yet in the middle 
   of that is a call to "ima_path_check()".

   Now, it looks like ima_path_check() is very much designed to only check 
   the _final_ path anyway, and was never meant to be used to check the 
   directories we hit on the way. In fact, the whole function starts with

	if (!ima_initialized || !S_ISREG(inode->i_mode))
		return 0;

   so it's totally pointless to do that thing on a directory where 
   that !S_ISREG() test will trigger.

   So just remove it. IMA should never have put that check in there to 
   begin with, it's just way too performance-sensitive.

 - the real filesystem permission checks. 

   We used to do the common case entirely in the VFS layer, but these days 
   the common case includes POSIX ACL checking, and as a result, the 
   trivial short-circuit code in the VFS layer almost never triggers in
   practice, and we call down to the low-level filesystem for each 
   component. 

   We can't fix that by just removing the call, but what we _can_ do is to 
   at least avoid the silly calling back-and-forth: most filesystems will 
   just call back to the VFS layer to do the "generic_permission()" with 
   their own ACL-checking routines.

   That way we can flatten the call-chain out a bit, and avoid one 
   unnecessary indirect call in that timing-critical region. And 
   eventually, if we make the whole ACL caching thing be something that we 
   do at a VFS layer (Al Viro already worked on _some_ of that), we'll be 
   able to avoid the calls entirely when we can see the cached ACL 
   pointers directly.

So this series of 8 patches do all these preliminary things. As shown by 
the diffstat below, it actually reduces the lines of code (mainly by just 
removing the silly per-filesystem wrappers around "generic_permission()") 
and it also makes it a _lot_ clearer what actually gets called in that 
whole 'exec_permission_lite()' function that we use to check the 
permission of a pathname lookup.

Comments?  Especially from the IMA people (first patch) and from generic 
VFS, security and low-level FS people (the 'Simplify exec_permission_lite' 
series, and then the check_acl + per-filesystem changes).

Al?

I'm looking to merge these shortly after 2.6.31 is released, but comments 
welcome.

			Linus

----
Linus Torvalds (8):
  Do not call 'ima_path_check()' for each path component
  Simplify exec_permission_lite() logic
  Simplify exec_permission_lite() further
  Simplify exec_permission_lite(), part 3
  Make 'check_acl()' a first-class filesystem op
  shmfs: use 'check_acl' instead of 'permission'
  ext[234]: move over to 'check_acl' permission model
  jffs2/jfs/xfs: switch over to 'check_acl' rather than 'permission()'

 fs/ext2/acl.c               |    8 +----
 fs/ext2/acl.h               |    4 +-
 fs/ext2/file.c              |    2 +-
 fs/ext2/namei.c             |    4 +-
 fs/ext3/acl.c               |    8 +----
 fs/ext3/acl.h               |    4 +-
 fs/ext3/file.c              |    2 +-
 fs/ext3/namei.c             |    4 +-
 fs/ext4/acl.c               |    8 +----
 fs/ext4/acl.h               |    4 +-
 fs/ext4/file.c              |    2 +-
 fs/ext4/namei.c             |    4 +-
 fs/jffs2/acl.c              |    7 +---
 fs/jffs2/acl.h              |    4 +-
 fs/jffs2/dir.c              |    2 +-
 fs/jffs2/file.c             |    2 +-
 fs/jffs2/symlink.c          |    2 +-
 fs/jfs/acl.c                |    7 +---
 fs/jfs/file.c               |    2 +-
 fs/jfs/jfs_acl.h            |    2 +-
 fs/jfs/namei.c              |    2 +-
 fs/namei.c                  |   82 +++++++++++++++++++++---------------------
 fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_iops.c |   16 ++------
 include/linux/fs.h          |    1 +
 include/linux/shmem_fs.h    |    2 +-
 mm/shmem.c                  |    6 ++--
 mm/shmem_acl.c              |   11 +-----
 27 files changed, 79 insertions(+), 123 deletions(-)
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