Re: [PATCH v2] vfs: shave work on failed file open

[Jann Horn]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2023 at 11:20 AM Christian Brauner <brauner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > But yes, that protection would be broken by SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU,
> > since then the "f_count is zero" is no longer a final thing.
>
> I've tried coming up with a patch that is simple enough so the pattern
> is easy to follow and then converting all places to rely on a pattern
> that combine lookup_fd_rcu() or similar with get_file_rcu(). The obvious
> thing is that we'll force a few places to now always acquire a reference
> when they don't really need one right now and that already may cause
> performance issues.

(Those places are probably used way less often than the hot
open/fget/close paths though.)

> We also can't fully get rid of plain get_file_rcu() uses itself because
> of users such as mm->exe_file. They don't go from one of the rcu fdtable
> lookup helpers to the struct file obviously. They rcu replace the file
> pointer in their struct ofc so we could change get_file_rcu() to take a
> struct file __rcu **f and then comparing that the passed in pointer
> hasn't changed before we managed to do atomic_long_inc_not_zero(). Which
> afaict should work for such cases.
>
> But overall we would introduce a fairly big and at the same time subtle
> semantic change. The idea is pretty neat and it was fun to do but I'm
> just not convinced we should do it given how ubiquitous struct file is
> used and now to make the semanics even more special by allowing
> refcounts.
>
> I've kept your original release_empty_file() proposal in vfs.misc which
> I think is a really nice change.
>
> Let me know if you all passionately disagree. ;)