Cache xattr security drop check for write v2

Some recent benchmarking on btrfs showed that a major scaling bottleneck
on large systems on btrfs is currently the xattr lookup on every write.

Why xattr lookup on every write I hear you ask?

write wants to drop suid and security related xattrs that could set o
capabilities for executables.  To do that it currently looks up
security.capability on EVERY write (even for non executables) to decide
whether to drop it or not.

In btrfs this causes an additional tree walk, hitting some per file system
locks and quite bad scalability. In a simple read workload on a 8S
system I saw over 90% CPU time in spinlocks related to that.

Chris Mason tells me this is also a problem in ext4, where it hits
the global mbcache lock.

This patch adds a simple per inode to avoid this problem.  We only
do the lookup once per file and then if there is no xattr cache
the decision. All xattr changes clear the flag.

I also used the same flag to avoid the suid check, although
that one is pretty cheap.

A file system can also set this flag when it creates the inode,
if it has a cheap way to do so.  This is done for some common file systems
in followon patches.

With this patch a major part of the lock contention disappears
for btrfs. Some testing on smaller systems didn't show significant
performance changes, but at least it helps the larger systems
and is generally more efficient.

v2: Rename is_sgid. add file system helper.
Cc: chris.mason@oracle.com
Cc: josef@redhat.com
Cc: viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk
Cc: agruen@linbit.com
Cc: Serge E. Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/attr.c b/fs/attr.c
index 91dbe2a107f2..caf2aa521e2b 100644
--- a/fs/attr.c
+++ b/fs/attr.c
@@ -175,6 +175,13 @@ int notify_change(struct dentry * dentry, struct iattr * attr)
 			return -EPERM;
 	}
 
+	if ((ia_valid & ATTR_MODE)) {
+		mode_t amode = attr->ia_mode;
+		/* Flag setting protected by i_mutex */
+		if (is_sxid(amode))
+			inode->i_flags &= ~S_NOSEC;
+	}
+
 	now = current_fs_time(inode->i_sb);
 
 	attr->ia_ctime = now;