[PATCH 00/24] vfs: require filesystems to explicitly opt-in to lease support

[Jan Kara]

On Thu 08-01-26 13:56:57, Jeff Layton wrote:
> On Thu, 2026-01-08 at 18:40 +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> > On Thu 08-01-26 12:12:55, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > > Yesterday, I sent patches to fix how directory delegation support is
> > > handled on filesystems where the should be disabled [1]. That set is
> > > appropriate for v6.19. For v7.0, I want to make lease support be more
> > > opt-in, rather than opt-out:
> > > 
> > > For historical reasons, when ->setlease() file_operation is set to NULL,
> > > the default is to use the kernel-internal lease implementation. This
> > > means that if you want to disable them, you need to explicitly set the
> > > ->setlease() file_operation to simple_nosetlease() or the equivalent.
> > > 
> > > This has caused a number of problems over the years as some filesystems
> > > have inadvertantly allowed leases to be acquired simply by having left
> > > it set to NULL. It would be better if filesystems had to opt-in to lease
> > > support, particularly with the advent of directory delegations.
> > > 
> > > This series has sets the ->setlease() operation in a pile of existing
> > > local filesystems to generic_setlease() and then changes
> > > kernel_setlease() to return -EINVAL when the setlease() operation is not
> > > set.
> > > 
> > > With this change, new filesystems will need to explicitly set the
> > > ->setlease() operations in order to provide lease and delegation
> > > support.
> > > 
> > > I mainly focused on filesystems that are NFS exportable, since NFS and
> > > SMB are the main users of file leases, and they tend to end up exporting
> > > the same filesystem types. Let me know if I've missed any.
> > 
> > So, what about kernfs and fuse? They seem to be exportable and don't have
> > .setlease set...
> > 
> 
> Yes, FUSE needs this too. I'll add a patch for that.
> 
> As far as kernfs goes: AIUI, that's basically what sysfs and resctrl
> are built on. Do we really expect people to set leases there?
> 
> I guess it's technically a regression since you could set them on those
> sorts of files earlier, but people don't usually export kernfs based
> filesystems via NFS or SMB, and that seems like something that could be
> used to make mischief.

I agree exporting kernfs based filesystem doesn't make a huge amount of
sense.

> AFAICT, kernfs_export_ops is mostly to support open_by_handle_at(). See
> commit aa8188253474 ("kernfs: add exportfs operations").
> 
> One idea: we could add a wrapper around generic_setlease() for
> filesystems like this that will do a WARN_ONCE() and then call
> generic_setlease(). That would keep leases working on them but we might
> get some reports that would tell us who's setting leases on these files
> and why.

Yeah, this makes sense at least for some transition period so that we
faster learn if our judgement about sane / insane lease use was wrong.

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