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Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/2] i_generation / st_gen support for handle ba


From: Harsh Bora
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/2] i_generation / st_gen support for handle based fs driver
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:46:19 +0530
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On 08/10/2011 08:47 PM, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Stefan Hajnoczi<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 12:32 PM, Aneesh Kumar K.V
<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Fri, 5 Aug 2011 10:24:42 +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 7:40 AM, Aneesh Kumar K.V
<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Thu, 4 Aug 2011 22:57:34 +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 7:45 PM, Aneesh Kumar K.V
<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Thu, 4 Aug 2011 15:31:08 +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Aneesh Kumar K.V
<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Thu, 4 Aug 2011 12:47:42 +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 12:20 PM, Aneesh Kumar K.V
<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Thu, 4 Aug 2011 11:21:05 +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi<address@hidden>  wrote:
On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Harsh Prateek Bora
<address@hidden>  wrote:
This patch provides support for st_gen for handle based fs type server.
Currently the support is provided for ext4, btrfs, reiserfs and xfs.

Signed-off-by: Harsh Prateek Bora<address@hidden>
---
  hw/9pfs/virtio-9p-handle.c |   30 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  1 files changed, 30 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Does handle-based file I/O really need to duplicate all this code?  Is
it possible to use either regular open or handle-based open from a
single local fs codebase?

The only details common between handle based and local based getversion
callback is the ioctl. Moving that into a helper may not really help in
this case ?.

Aneesh, do you have a public virtfs tree that I can look at?  In
qemu.git we don't have virtio-9p-handle.c yet, so I can't give any
specific feedback.

http://repo.or.cz/w/qemu/v9fs.git for-upstream

I should send the patchset to qemu list soon. Was waiting for the
co-routine patches to go upstream.

The handle code looks like a copy of the local backend minus security
models.  It just needs to use handle syscalls instead of using paths.

If you treat the path as the "handle" and use regular openat(2), then
the handle code could do what the local backend does today.  Except
compared to the local backend it would not have security models and be
a bit slower due to extra syscalls.

Is the plan to add security models to the handle backend?  If so, then
handle and local will be equivalent and duplicate code.


handle require root user privileges to run. So security model with
handle fs driver doesn't make sense. We added mapped security model to
avoid requiring user to run as root.

Does it really require root or is a specific set of capabilities
enough?

CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH  is needed.


A feature that requires QEMU to run as root has really limited value.
Unprivileged users cannot use the feature, so ad-hoc QEMU users are
left behind.  People don't want to deploy production guests as root,
may not be allowed to, or might find that their management tool
doesn't support that.  So who will be able to use this feature?


One of the main issue that handle based backend fix is the complexity
involved in handling renames, both on the guest and on the host. I am
also not sure how effective it would be to run the qemu as non root user
when exporting a directory with VirtFS. In the mapped security model the
user credentials with which the files are created are stored in xattr
and that mostly implies host cannot look at the files the same way.

My understanding is passthrough security model (which require qemu to
run as root) will be used if somebody wants to export a directory on the
host to guest. In my case I use none security model, simply because i
don't want new xattr on the file created and I am ok even the files
get created on the host with the credentials on qemu.

With xattrs you have to mount the directory on the host in order to
see the same view as the guest.

How will that help ? There is nothing on the host that maps those xattr
to mode/ownership bits currently. We will have to do something similar to fuse 
to
make that work ?

Sorry, what I suggested is not actually possible today.  We only have
a virtio-9p transport in the QEMU 9pfs code, not a TCP transport.  I
meant mount -t 9p on the host - don't access the backing directory
directly, instead mount it using 9p on localhost.

My understanding was passthrough will be preferred
option. But i may be mistaken.

If passthrough requires all of QEMU to run as root, then we need to
find a way to run that code separately and drop privileges in QEMU.

The chroot helper process patches that Mohan posted might be a
solution.  The chroot helper does all path and permissions-related
operations in a separate process.  File descriptor passing is used so
that QEMU can perform read/write operations itself without copying
data.

Then we just need to make sure that QEMU itself runs unprivileged and
the chroot helper is able to run as root for the passthrough security
model.

Harsh, any thoughts on this?

Hi Stefan,
I am still not sure if it is really a big concern for VirtFS users, and if really required, we can move the functionality to a privileged process and but that would require Qemu to be initially run as root and then drop privileges to a certain non-root user. However, lets take this discussion separately and see what community thinks about it. If the community agrees, we can do it when we merge the chroot patch series. I therefore posted v2 for the st_gen patch to keep that isolated.

- Harsh

Stefan




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