Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:27:41 -0400 | From | Christoph Hellwig <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 3/4] integrity: Linux Integrity Module(LIM) |
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On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 12:02:55PM -0500, Serge E. Hallyn wrote: > > > Sorry, but I don't think we can bloat the inode even further for this. > > > > The original version of IMA was LSM based, using i_security. Based > > on discussions on the LSM mailing list, it was decided that the LSM hooks > > were meant only for access control. During the same time frame, there > > was a lot of work done in stacking LSM modules and i_security, but that > > approach was dropped. It was suggested that we define a separate set of > > hooks for integrity, which this patch set provides. Caching integrity > > results is an important aspect. Any suggestions in lieu of defining > > i_integrity? > > The i_integrity is only bloating the inode if LIM is enabled. Surely > that beats having LIM define its own hash table and locking to track > integrity labels on inodes? Do you have another suggestion? > > Or is the concern about having more #ifdefs in the struct inode > definition?
No, the concern is over bloating the inode for a rather academic fringe feature. As this comes from IBM I'm pretty sure someone will pressure the big distro to turn it on. And inode growth is a concern for fileserving or other inode heavy workload. Mimi mentioned this is just a cache of information, so consider using something like XFS's mru cache which is used for something similar where the xfs_inode was kept small despite a very niche feature needing a cache attached to the inode:
fs/xfs/xfs_mru_cache.c
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