Re: [RFC PATCH] getvalues(2) prototype

From: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
To: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@redhat.com>,
	linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	Linux API <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>,
	linux-man <linux-man@vger.kernel.org>,
	LSM <linux-security-module@vger.kernel.org>,
	Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>, Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net>,
	David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
	Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>,
	Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>,
	James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] getvalues(2) prototype
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2022 09:57:26 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAJfpegv6PmZ_RXipBs9UEjv_WfEUtTDE1uNZq+9fBkCzWPvXkw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20220323225843.GI1609613@dread.disaster.area>

On Wed, 23 Mar 2022 at 23:58, Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 08:27:12PM +0100, Miklos Szeredi wrote:

> > - Interfaces for getting various attributes and statistics are fragmented.
> >   For files we have basic stat, statx, extended attributes, file attributes
> >   (for which there are two overlapping ioctl interfaces).  For mounts and
> >   superblocks we have stat*fs as well as /proc/$PID/{mountinfo,mountstats}.
> >   The latter also has the problem on not allowing queries on a specific
> >   mount.
>
> https://xkcd.com/927/

Haha!

> I've said in the past when discussing things like statx() that maybe
> everything should be addressable via the xattr namespace and
> set/queried via xattr names regardless of how the filesystem stores
> the data. The VFS/filesystem simply translates the name to the
> storage location of the information. It might be held in xattrs, but
> it could just be a flag bit in an inode field.

Right, that would definitely make sense for inode attributes.

What about other objects' attributes, statistics?   Remember this
started out as a way to replace /proc/self/mountinfo with something
that can query individual mount.

> > mnt                    - list of mount parameters
> > mnt:mountpoint         - the mountpoint of the mount of $ORIGIN
> > mntns                  - list of mount ID's reachable from the current root
> > mntns:21:parentid      - parent ID of the mount with ID of 21
> > xattr:security.selinux - the security.selinux extended attribute
> > data:foo/bar           - the data contained in file $ORIGIN/foo/bar
>
> How are these different from just declaring new xattr namespaces for
> these things. e.g. open any file and list the xattrs in the
> xattr:mount.mnt namespace to get the list of mount parameters for
> that mount.

Okay.

> Why do we need a new "xattr in everything but name" interface when
> we could just extend the one we've already got and formalise a new,
> cleaner version of xattr batch APIs that have been around for 20-odd
> years already?

Seems to make sense. But...will listxattr list everyting recursively?
I guess that won't work, better just list traditional xattrs,
otherwise we'll likely get regressions, and anyway the point of a
hierarchical namespace is to be able to list nodes on each level.  We
can use getxattr() for this purpose, just like getvalues() does in the
above example.

Thanks,
Miklos