[PATCH] fs/ceph: set superblock s_magic for IMA fsmagic matching: up to 60x speedup

[Viacheslav Dubeyko]

On Thu, 2025-05-29 at 17:45 +0000, Dennis Marttinen wrote:
> The CephFS kernel driver forgets to set the filesystem magic signature in
> its superblock. As a result, IMA policy rules based on fsmagic matching do
> not apply as intended. This causes a major performance regression in Talos
> Linux [1] when mounting CephFS volumes, such as when deploying Rook Ceph
> [2]. Talos Linux ships a hardened kernel with the following IMA policy
> (irrelevant lines omitted):
> 
> # cat /sys/kernel/security/integrity/ima/policy
> [...]
> dont_measure fsmagic=0xc36400 # CEPH_SUPER_MAGIC
> [...]
> measure func=FILE_CHECK mask=^MAY_READ euid=0
> measure func=FILE_CHECK mask=^MAY_READ uid=0
> [...]
> 
> Currently, IMA compares 0xc36400 == 0x0 for CephFS files, resulting in all
> files opened with O_RDONLY or O_RDWR getting measured with SHA512 on every
> open(2):
> 
> # cat /data/cephfs/test-file
> # tail -1 /sys/kernel/security/integrity/ima/ascii_runtime_measurements
> 10 69990c87e8af323d47e2d6ae4... ima-ng sha512:<hash> /data/cephfs/test-file
> 
> Since O_WRONLY is rare, this results in an order of magnitude lower
> performance than expected for practically all file operations. Properly
> setting CEPH_SUPER_MAGIC in the CephFS superblock resolves the regression.
> 
> Tests performed on a 3x replicated Ceph v19.3.0 cluster across three
> i5-7200U nodes each equipped with one Micron 7400 MAX M.2 disk (BlueStore)
> and Gigabit ethernet, on Talos Linux v1.10.2:
> 
> FS-Mark 3.3
> Test: 500 Files, Empty
> Files/s > Higher Is Better
> 6.12.27-talos . 16.6  |====
> +twelho patch . 208.4 |====================================================
> 
> FS-Mark 3.3
> Test: 500 Files, 1KB Size
> Files/s > Higher Is Better
> 6.12.27-talos . 15.6  |=======
> +twelho patch . 118.6 |====================================================
> 
> FS-Mark 3.3
> Test: 500 Files, 32 Sub Dirs, 1MB Size
> Files/s > Higher Is Better
> 6.12.27-talos . 12.7 |===============
> +twelho patch . 44.7 |=====================================================
> 
> IO500 [3] 2fcd6d6 results (benchmarks within variance omitted):
> 
> > IO500 benchmark   | 6.12.27-talos  | +twelho patch  | Speedup   |
> > -------------------|----------------|----------------|-----------|
> > mdtest-easy-write | 0.018524 kIOPS | 1.135027 kIOPS | 6027.33 % |
> > mdtest-hard-write | 0.018498 kIOPS | 0.973312 kIOPS | 5161.71 % |
> > ior-easy-read     | 0.064727 GiB/s | 0.155324 GiB/s | 139.97 %  |
> > mdtest-hard-read  | 0.018246 kIOPS | 0.780800 kIOPS | 4179.29 % |
> 
> This applies outside of synthetic benchmarks as well, for example, the time
> to rsync a 55 MiB directory with ~12k of mostly small files drops from an
> unusable 10m5s to a reasonable 26s (23x the throughput).
> 
> [1]: https://www.talos.dev/  
> [2]: https://www.talos.dev/v1.10/kubernetes-guides/configuration/ceph-with-rook/  
> [3]: https://github.com/IO500/io500  
> 
> Signed-off-by: Dennis Marttinen <twelho at welho.tech>
> ---
> It took me a year to hunt this down: profiling distributed filesystems is
> non-trivial. Since the regression is associated with IMA use, I received a
> hint to CC the folks associated with IMA code. The patch targets the 6.12
> kernel series currently used by Talos Linux, but should apply on top of
> master as well. Please note that this is an independent contribution -
> I am not affiliated with any company or organization.
> 
>  fs/ceph/super.c | 1 +
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
> 
> diff --git a/fs/ceph/super.c b/fs/ceph/super.c
> index 73f321b52895e..9549f97233a9e 100644
> --- a/fs/ceph/super.c
> +++ b/fs/ceph/super.c
> @@ -1217,6 +1217,7 @@ static int ceph_set_super(struct super_block *s, struct fs_context *fc)
>  	s->s_time_min = 0;
>  	s->s_time_max = U32_MAX;
>  	s->s_flags |= SB_NODIRATIME | SB_NOATIME;
> +	s->s_magic = CEPH_SUPER_MAGIC;
>  

Yeah, makes sense. Thanks a lot for the fix. It's really non-trivial issue.

Reviewed-by: Viacheslav Dubeyko <Slava.Dubeyko at ibm.com>

Thanks,
Slava.

>  	ceph_fscrypt_set_ops(s);
>  
> 
> base-commit: adc218676eef25575469234709c2d87185ca223a