[PATCH 1/6] statx: Add a system call to make enhanced file info available

[J. Bruce Fields]

On Mon, May 09, 2016 at 11:45:43AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> [ OT, but I'll reply anyway :P ]
> 
> On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 02:29:23PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 08:56:02AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > In the latest XFS filesystem format, we randomise the generation
> > > value during every inode allocation to make it hard to guess the
> > > handle of adjacent inodes from an existing ino+gen pair, or even
> > > from life time to life time of the same inode.
> > 
> > The one thing I wonder about is whether that increases the probability
> > of a filehandle collision (where you accidentally generate the same
> > filehandle for two different files).
> 
> Not possible - inode number is still different between the two
> files. i.e. ino+gen makes the handle unique, not gen.
> 
> > If the generation number is a 32-bit counter per inode number (is that
> > actually the way filesystems work?), then it takes 2^32 reuses of the
> > inode number to hit the same filehandle.
> 
> 4 billion unlink/create operations that hit the same inode number
> are going to take some time. I suspect someone will notice the load
> generated by an attmept to brute force this sort of thing ;)
> 
> > If you choose it randomly then
> > you expect a collision after about 2^16 reuses.
> 
> I'm pretty sure that a random search will need to, on average,
> search half the keyspace before a match is found (i.e. 2^31
> attempts, not 2^16).

Yeah, but I was wondering whether you could somehow get into the
situation where clients between then are caching N distinct filehandles
with the same inode number.  Then a collision becomes likely around
2^16, by the usual birthday paradox rule-of-thumb.

Uh, but now that I think of it that's irrelevant.  At most one of those
filehandles actually refers to a still-existing file.  Any attempt to
use the other 2^16-1 should return -ESTALE.  So collisions among that
set don't matter, it's only collisions involving the existing file that
are interesting.  So, nevermind, I can't see a practical way to hit a
problem here....

--b.