[RFC PATCH] getvalues(2) prototype

[Casey Schaufler]

On 3/23/2022 3:58 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 08:27:12PM +0100, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
>> Add a new userspace API that allows getting multiple short values in a
>> single syscall.
>>
>> This would be useful for the following reasons:
>>
>> - Calling open/read/close for many small files is inefficient.  E.g. on my
>>    desktop invoking lsof(1) results in ~60k open + read + close calls under
>>    /proc and 90% of those are 128 bytes or less.
> How does doing the open/read/close in a single syscall make this any
> more efficient? All it saves is the overhead of a couple of
> syscalls, it doesn't reduce any of the setup or teardown overhead
> needed to read the data itself....
>
>> - Interfaces for getting various attributes and statistics are fragmented.
>>    For files we have basic stat, statx, extended attributes, file attributes
>>    (for which there are two overlapping ioctl interfaces).  For mounts and
>>    superblocks we have stat*fs as well as /proc/$PID/{mountinfo,mountstats}.
>>    The latter also has the problem on not allowing queries on a specific
>>    mount.
> https://xkcd.com/927/
>
>> - Some attributes are cheap to generate, some are expensive.  Allowing
>>    userspace to select which ones it needs should allow optimizing queries.
>>
>> - Adding an ascii namespace should allow easy extension and self
>>    description.
>>
>> - The values can be text or binary, whichever is fits best.
>>
>> The interface definition is:
>>
>> struct name_val {
>> 	const char *name;	/* in */
>> 	struct iovec value_in;	/* in */
>> 	struct iovec value_out;	/* out */
>> 	uint32_t error;		/* out */
>> 	uint32_t reserved;
>> };
> Ahhh, XFS_IOC_ATTRMULTI_BY_HANDLE reborn. This is how xfsdump gets
> and sets attributes efficiently when dumping and restoring files -
> it's an interface that allows batches of xattr operations to be run
> on a file in a single syscall.
>
> I've said in the past when discussing things like statx() that maybe
> everything should be addressable via the xattr namespace and
> set/queried via xattr names regardless of how the filesystem stores
> the data. The VFS/filesystem simply translates the name to the
> storage location of the information. It might be held in xattrs, but
> it could just be a flag bit in an inode field.
>
> Then we just get named xattrs in batches from an open fd.
>
>> int getvalues(int dfd, const char *path, struct name_val *vec, size_t num,
>> 	      unsigned int flags);
>>
>> @dfd and @path are used to lookup object $ORIGIN.  @vec contains @num
>> name/value descriptors.  @flags contains lookup flags for @path.
>>
>> The syscall returns the number of values filled or an error.
>>
>> A single name/value descriptor has the following fields:
>>
>> @name describes the object whose value is to be returned.  E.g.
>>
>> mnt                    - list of mount parameters
>> mnt:mountpoint         - the mountpoint of the mount of $ORIGIN
>> mntns                  - list of mount ID's reachable from the current root
>> mntns:21:parentid      - parent ID of the mount with ID of 21
>> xattr:security.selinux - the security.selinux extended attribute
>> data:foo/bar           - the data contained in file $ORIGIN/foo/bar
> How are these different from just declaring new xattr namespaces for
> these things. e.g. open any file and list the xattrs in the
> xattr:mount.mnt namespace to get the list of mount parameters for
> that mount.

There is a significant and vocal set of people who dislike xattrs
passionately. I often hear them whinging whenever someone proposes
using them. I think that your suggestion has all the advantages of
the getvalues(2) interface while also addressing its shortcomings.
If we could get it past the anti-xattr crowd we might have something.
You could even provide getvalues() on top of it.

>
> Why do we need a new "xattr in everything but name" interface when
> we could just extend the one we've already got and formalise a new,
> cleaner version of xattr batch APIs that have been around for 20-odd
> years already?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave.
>