Re: [RFC bpf-next fanotify 2/5] samples/fanotify: Add a sample fanotify fastpath handler

[Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>]

On Wed 06-11-24 20:40:50, Amir Goldstein wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 2:52 AM Song Liu <songliubraving@meta.com> wrote:
> > > Alternately, maybe there is some way to designate that an entire
> > > vfsmount is a child of a watched (or ignored) directory?
> > >
> > >> @Christian, I would like to know your thoughts on this (walking up the
> > >> directory tree in fanotify fastpath handler). It can be expensive for
> > >> very very deep subtree.
> > >>
> > >
> > > I'm not Christian, but I'll make the case for it. It's basically a
> > > bunch of pointer chasing. That's probably not "cheap", but if you can
> > > do it under RCU it might not be too awful. It might still suck with
> > > really deep paths, but this is a sample module. It's not expected that
> > > everyone will want to use it anyway.
> >
> > Thanks for the suggestion! I will try to do it under RCU.
> >
> 
> That's the cost of doing a subtree filter.
> Not sure how it could be avoided?

Yes. For a real solution (not this example), we'd probably have to limit
the parent walk to say 16 steps and if we can reach neither root nor our
dir in that number of steps, we'll just chicken out and pass the event to
userspace to deal with it. This way the kernel filter will deal with most
cases anyway and we won't risk livelocking or too big performance overhead
of the filter.

For this example, I think using fs/dcache.c:is_subdir() will be OK for
demonstration purposes.

								Honza

-- 
Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
SUSE Labs, CR