NFS Client Updates for 2.6.24

Jeremy — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 12:31:08 +0000

Trond Myklebust noted the NFS client updates for the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel:

"Aside from the usual updates from Chuck for NFS-over-IPv6 (still incomplete) and a number of bugfixes for the text-based mount code, the main news in the NFS tree is the merging of support for the NFS/RDMA client code from Tom Talpey and the NetApp New England (NANE) team."

He continued, "we also have the 64-bit inode support from RedHat/Peter Staubach. There is also the addition of a nfs_vm_page_mkwrite() method in order to clean up the mmap() write code. Finally, I've been working on a number of updates for the attribute revalidation, having pulled apart most of the dentry and attribute revalidation into separate variables. A number of fixes that address existing bugs fell out of that review, which should hopefully result in more efficient dcache behaviour..." Actual source changes can be browsed in the NFS client git repository.

Copy on Write Credentials

Jeremy — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:16:19 +0000

"Here's a new version of my credentials patch. It's still very basic, with only Ext3, (V)FAT, NFS, AFS, SELinux and keyrings compiled in on an x86_64 arch kernel," stated David Howells. He described the patch as, "introduce a copy on write credentials record (struct cred). The fsuid, fsgid, supplementary groups list move into it (DAC security). The session, process and thread keyrings are reflected in it, but don't primarily reside there as they aren't per-thread and occasionally need to be instantiated or replaced by other threads or processes."

Casey Schaufler asked, "what I don't really understand is what value is gained by this exercise. Are the savings sufficiently significant to justify the effort?" Trond Myklebust explained, "it is not about savings, but about new functionality. Basically, the existence of reference-counted credentials will allow AFS and NFS to cache that information and use it for deferred writes etc." David added, "and also make it easier for cachefiles and hopefully NFSd to override the active security. There's a comment somewhere in, I think, the SunRPC code in the Linux kernel bemoaning the lack of this very feature:-)"

KernelTrap - Trond Myklebust

NFS Client Updates for 2.6.24

Copy on Write Credentials