Re: RFC: ACLs on fusefs

Having said that, I am not sure if the FUSE protocol itself is extensible
to accommodate the needs to directly implement the counterparts of our
existing ACL syscalls. Otherwise XATTR tunneling for both NFSv4 and POSIX
1.e on FUSE might be the only way to go.

May I know if there're any users of the XATTR approach besides the
e2fsprogs/fuse2fs implementation of the EXT4 filesystem?

Ka Ho

On Fri, Aug 2, 2024, 22:34 Ka Ho Ng <khng300@gmail.com> wrote:

> I would rather see the support of XATTR and NFSv4 ACL being two orthogonal
> things, just like how it's being worked out on ZFS.
>
> On Fri, Aug 2, 2024, 19:58 Alan Somers <asomers@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>> TLDR;
>> how useful would it be if fusefs(4) could support ACLs?
>>
>> The current state of fusefs is that while it has full support for
>> extended attributes, it lacks any support for ACLs.  If a file system
>> image contains files with ACL entries, the user can look them up with
>> getextattr, but they'll just look like a binary blob.  getfacl won't
>> work at all.  And the file system won't be able to enforce the ACLs
>> during VOP_ACCESS.
>>
>> Fixing this situation for posix.1e ACLs would require three things:
>> * A good test suite for posix.1e ACLs.  pjdfstest has some tests, but
>> it's incomplete.
>> * An example file system to use for testing the kernel driver.  It
>> isn't sufficient for the example file system merely to support xattrs,
>> because the file system server must also enforce inheritance of
>> default ACLs.
>> * The actual kernel support.  Enforcing ACLs during VOP_ACCESS must be
>> done within the kernel, not the server.  The important parts are
>> already in sub_acl_posix1e.c.  The fusefs test suite would need a few
>> more test cases for VOP_GETACL and VOP_SETACL, but wouldn't need to
>> test  any of the fancy stuff, like inheritance or enforcement during
>> access.
>>
>> Fixing the situation for NFSv4 ACLs would require the above, and also
>> a small extension to the fusefs protocol.
>>
>> All of the above might make a good GSoC project.  But is it worth our
>> time?  How many real-world users would benefit?  Alternatively, doing
>> just the kernel support would be fairly easy.  That would be too small
>> for GSoC.  But we could easily overlook important bugs if we don't do
>> the other steps, too.
>>
>> So my question is: is this worthwhile?  Does anybody know of a
>> real-world workload that would benefit?
>>
>>