Re: [PATCH v2 1/4] block: keyslot-manager: Introduce passthrough keyslot manager

[Satya Tangirala]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 09:44:23PM -0700, Eric Biggers wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 08:20:44AM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > And this just validates my argument that calling the inline crypto work
> > directly from the block layer instead of just down below in blk-mq was
> > wrong.  We should not require any support from stacking drivers at the
> > keyslot manager level.
> 
> I'm not sure what you're referring to here; could you clarify?
> 
> It's true that device-mapper devices don't need the actual keyslot management.
> But they do need the ability to expose crypto capabilities as well as a key
> eviction function.  And those are currently handled by
> "struct blk_keyslot_manager".  Hence the need for a "passthrough keyslot
> manager" that does those other things but not the actual keyslot management.
> 
> FWIW, I suggested splitting these up, but you disagreed and said you wanted the
> crypto capabilities to remain part of the blk_keyslot_manager
> (https://lkml.kernel.org/linux-block/20200327170047.GA24682@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/).
> If you've now changed your mind, please be clear about it.
> 
I thought what Christoph meant (and of course, please let us know
if I'm misunderstanding you, Christoph) was that if blk-mq
handled all the blk-crypto stuff including deciding whether to
use the blk-crypto-fallback, and blk-mq was responsible for
calling out to blk-crypto-fallback if required, then the device
mapper wouldn't need to expose any capabilities at all... or at
least not for bio-based device mapper devices, since bios would
go through the device mapper and eventually hit blk-mq which
would then handle crypto appropriately.

We couldn't do that because the crypto ciphers for the
blk-crypto-fallback couldn't be allocated on the data path (so we
needed fscrypt to ask blk-crypto to check whether the underlying
device supported the crypto capabilities it required, and
allocate ciphers appropriately, before the data path required the
ciphers). I'm checking to see if anything has changed w.r.t
allocating crypto ciphers on the data path (and checking if
memalloc_noio_save/restore() helps with that).
> - Eric