Re: [GIT PULL] f2fs updates for v4.6

[Jaegeuk Kim <jaegeuk@kernel.org>]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 10:53:52AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Good catch, Eric.
> 
> While waiting for explanations, I've committed the change to move back
> to just the page index.

Thank you.

+Ted

This was originally introduced in EXT4 for AOSP last year.
At that time, Ted suggested that it'd good to support it in F2FS as well for
AOSP. (It is now easy to build AOSP with F2FS anyway.)
So, I copied most of libraries from EXT4 and modified F2FS to activate that.

After then, as Dave suggested, we needed to move the crypto libraries into
common fs/crypto, so that other filesystems can support that in common sense.

Please check the below threads about this history.
http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-fsdevel/msg93424.html

In my sense currently, I can see that there is still no product shipped with
this by default.
It seems manufacturers have been continuing to run a bunch of stress and
functional tests. It's up to google's decision though.

Thanks,

> 
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 6:47 AM, Eric Biggers <ebiggers3@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Another question about the choice of IV.  If the page index in CPU order is
> > (supposed to be) used as the IV, doesn't make the on-disk format of the
> > filesystem endianness-dependent?  I thought that's a big no-no.
> 
> It is indeed a bad design choice, but at the same time I think it's
> time to just admit that big-endian is largely dead, and people don't
> necessarily need to worry about it too much. It makes it impossible to
> move a disk image from x86 and ARM to Sparc or BE powerpc, but it's
> not like anybody is actually going to do that. And PowerPC is moving
> towards LE particularly in environments that have any kind of sharing
> going on.
> 
> The code itself seems largely identical between ext4 and f2fs (which I
> assume is the reason for trying to move it to a shared subdirectory),
> and is fairly new. It was merged in both back in April of last year,
> so I can't tell if one or the other is supposedly the "official" one,
> or how much actual use the crypto extensions actually have yet. Adding
> Michael Halcrow to the Cc for comments.
> 
> I do wonder if it would make sense to just _force_ the use of the
> little-endian format, and make that memcpy be a
> 
>      *(__le64 *)xts_tweak = cpu_to_le64(pgoff);
> 
> instead. That would break any existing BE uses, but considering that
> this code is fairly new, those may simply not exist.
> 
> I also wonder if the xts_tweak should perhaps have both the page
> offset _and_ the inode number in it. Both ext4 and f2fs specify that
> xts tweak size to be 16 bytes, and right now fill the last 8 bytes
> with zero. Would it make sense to just put the inode number in there?
> I didn't look at the actual key stuff - maybe the key is already
> per-inode and it doesn't make any sense to add the inode info _again_,
> but if the key is fs-wide, maybe it would be a good idea? With a mount
> option so that you can keep any legacy filesystem images..
> 
>                    Linus