On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 01:59:37PM -0400, Ric Wheeler wrote: > > You could get both security and avoid the run time hit by fully > writing the file or by having a variation that relied on "discard" > (i.e., no need to zero data if we can discard or track it as > unwritten). It's certainly the case that if the device supports persistent discard, something which we definitely *should* do is to send the discard at fallocate time and then mark the space as initialized. Unfortunately, not all devices, and in particular no HDD's for which I aware support persistent discard. And, writing all zero's to the file is in fact what a number of programs for which I am aware (including an enterprise database) are doing, precisely because they tend to write into the fallocated space in a somewhat random order, and the extent conversion costs is in fact quite significant. But writing all zero's to the file before you can use it is quite costly; at the very least it burns disk bandwidth --- one of the main motivations of fallocate was to avoid needing to do a "write all zero pass", and while it does solve the problem for some use cases (such as DVR's), it's not a complete solution. Whether or not it is a security issue is debateable. If using the fallocate flag requires CAP_SYS_RAWIO, and the process has to explicitly ask for the privilege, a process with those privileges can directly access memory and I/O ports directly, via the ioperm(2) and iopl(2) system calls. So I think it's possible to be a bit nuanced over whether or not this is as horrible as you might think. Ultimately, if there are application programmers who are really desperate for that the last bit of performance, they can always use FIBMAP/FIEMAP and then read/write directly to the block device. (And no, that's not a theoretical example.) I think it is a worthwhile goal to provide file system interfaces that allow a trusted process which has the appropriate security capabilities to do things in a safer way than that. Regards, - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
