Re: [PATCH 03/18] f2fs crypto: declare some definitions for f2fs encryption feature

From: Tom Marshall
Date: Thu May 14 2015 - 12:50:55 EST


Please keep in mind that I'm also working on transparent compression. I'm watching this thread closely so that I can implement a compression library alongside the crypto library. If there is any interest or benefit, I would be glad to work together so that the two can be done cooperatively at the same time.

On 05/13/2015 06:56 PM, Jaegeuk Kim wrote:
On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 10:37:21AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:48:02PM -0700, Jaegeuk Kim wrote:
On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 12:02:08PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 09:20:38PM -0700, Jaegeuk Kim wrote:
This definitions will be used by inode and superblock for encyption.
How much of this crypto stuff is common with or only slightly
modified from the ext4 code? Is the behaviour and features the
same? Is the user API and management tools the same?

IMO, if there is any amount of overlap, then we should be
implementing this stuff as generic code, not propagating the same
code through multiple filesystems via copy-n-paste-n-modify. This
will simply end up with diverging code, different bugs and feature
sets, and none of the implementations will get the review and
maintenance they really require...

And, FWIW, this is the reason why I originally asked for the ext4
encryption code to be pulled up to the VFS: precisely so we didn't
end up with a rapid proliferation of individual in-filesystem
encryption implementations that are all slightly different...
Totally agreed!

AFAIK, Ted wants to push the codes as a crypto library into fs/ finally, so
I believe most part of crypto codes are common.
Can I suggest fs/crypto/ if there are going to be multiple files?
No problem at all. I'll do.

But, in order to realize that quickly, Ted implemented the feature to finalize
on-disk and in-memory design in EXT4 as a first step.
Then, I've been catching up and validating its design by implementing it in
F2FS, which also intends to figure out what crypto codes can be exactly common.
Excellent. That will make it easier and less error prone for other
filesystems to implement it, too!

As Ted mentioned before, since next android version tries to use per-file
encryption, F2FS also needs to support it as quick as possible likewise EXT4.
Fair enough.

Meanwhile, surely I've been working on writing patches to push them into fs/;
currenlty, I did for cryto.c and will do for crypto_key.c and crypto_fname.c.
But, it needs to think about crypto_policy.c differently, since it may depend
on how each filesystem stores the policy information respectively; we cannot
push all the filesystems should use xattrs, right?
All filesystems likely to implement per-file crypto support xattrs,
and this is exactly what xattrs are designed for. e.g. we already
require xattrs for generic security labels, ACLs, etc. Hence
per-file crypto information should also use a common, shared xattr
format. That way it only needs to be implemented once in the generic
code and there's very little (hopefully nothing!) each filesystem
has to customise to store the crypto information for each file.
Ok, I see. Let me take a look at that too.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. :)

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/