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

[Amir Goldstein]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2026 at 7:57 PM Jeff Layton <jlayton at kernel.org> 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.
>
> 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.

IMO, you are being too cautious, but whatever.

It is not accurate that kernfs filesystems are NFS exportable in general.
Only cgroupfs has KERNFS_ROOT_SUPPORT_EXPORTOP.

If any application is using leases on cgroup files, it must be some
very advanced runtime (i.e. systemd), so we should know about the
regression sooner rather than later.

There are also the recently added nsfs and pidfs export_operations.

I have a recollection about wanting to be explicit about not allowing
those to be exportable to NFS (nsfs specifically), but I can't see where
and if that restriction was done.

Christian? Do you remember?

Thanks,
Amir.