A mirror of the official Linux kernel repository just in case
Go to file
Gabriel Krisman Bertazi b886ee3e77 ext4: Support case-insensitive file name lookups
This patch implements the actual support for case-insensitive file name
lookups in ext4, based on the feature bit and the encoding stored in the
superblock.

A filesystem that has the casefold feature set is able to configure
directories with the +F (EXT4_CASEFOLD_FL) attribute, enabling lookups
to succeed in that directory in a case-insensitive fashion, i.e: match
a directory entry even if the name used by userspace is not a byte per
byte match with the disk name, but is an equivalent case-insensitive
version of the Unicode string.  This operation is called a
case-insensitive file name lookup.

The feature is configured as an inode attribute applied to directories
and inherited by its children.  This attribute can only be enabled on
empty directories for filesystems that support the encoding feature,
thus preventing collision of file names that only differ by case.

* dcache handling:

For a +F directory, Ext4 only stores the first equivalent name dentry
used in the dcache. This is done to prevent unintentional duplication of
dentries in the dcache, while also allowing the VFS code to quickly find
the right entry in the cache despite which equivalent string was used in
a previous lookup, without having to resort to ->lookup().

d_hash() of casefolded directories is implemented as the hash of the
casefolded string, such that we always have a well-known bucket for all
the equivalencies of the same string. d_compare() uses the
utf8_strncasecmp() infrastructure, which handles the comparison of
equivalent, same case, names as well.

For now, negative lookups are not inserted in the dcache, since they
would need to be invalidated anyway, because we can't trust missing file
dentries.  This is bad for performance but requires some leveraging of
the vfs layer to fix.  We can live without that for now, and so does
everyone else.

* on-disk data:

Despite using a specific version of the name as the internal
representation within the dcache, the name stored and fetched from the
disk is a byte-per-byte match with what the user requested, making this
implementation 'name-preserving'. i.e. no actual information is lost
when writing to storage.

DX is supported by modifying the hashes used in +F directories to make
them case/encoding-aware.  The new disk hashes are calculated as the
hash of the full casefolded string, instead of the string directly.
This allows us to efficiently search for file names in the htree without
requiring the user to provide an exact name.

* Dealing with invalid sequences:

By default, when a invalid UTF-8 sequence is identified, ext4 will treat
it as an opaque byte sequence, ignoring the encoding and reverting to
the old behavior for that unique file.  This means that case-insensitive
file name lookup will not work only for that file.  An optional bit can
be set in the superblock telling the filesystem code and userspace tools
to enforce the encoding.  When that optional bit is set, any attempt to
create a file name using an invalid UTF-8 sequence will fail and return
an error to userspace.

* Normalization algorithm:

The UTF-8 algorithms used to compare strings in ext4 is implemented
lives in fs/unicode, and is based on a previous version developed by
SGI.  It implements the Canonical decomposition (NFD) algorithm
described by the Unicode specification 12.1, or higher, combined with
the elimination of ignorable code points (NFDi) and full
case-folding (CF) as documented in fs/unicode/utf8_norm.c.

NFD seems to be the best normalization method for EXT4 because:

  - It has a lower cost than NFC/NFKC (which requires
    decomposing to NFD as an intermediary step)
  - It doesn't eliminate important semantic meaning like
    compatibility decompositions.

Although:

  - This implementation is not completely linguistic accurate, because
  different languages have conflicting rules, which would require the
  specialization of the filesystem to a given locale, which brings all
  sorts of problems for removable media and for users who use more than
  one language.

Signed-off-by: Gabriel Krisman Bertazi <krisman@collabora.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
2019-04-25 14:12:08 -04:00
arch A collection of x86 and ARM bugfixes, and some improvements to documentation. 2019-03-31 08:55:59 -07:00
block blk-mq: fix sbitmap ws_active for shared tags 2019-03-25 13:05:47 -06:00
certs kexec, KEYS: Make use of platform keyring for signature verify 2019-02-04 17:34:07 -05:00
crypto lib/lzo: separate lzo-rle from lzo 2019-03-07 18:32:03 -08:00
Documentation A collection of x86 and ARM bugfixes, and some improvements to documentation. 2019-03-31 08:55:59 -07:00
drivers dmaengine-5.10-rc3 2019-03-31 07:42:39 -07:00
fs ext4: Support case-insensitive file name lookups 2019-04-25 14:12:08 -04:00
include ext4: Support case-insensitive file name lookups 2019-04-25 14:12:08 -04:00
init init/main: add checks for the return value of memblock_alloc*() 2019-03-12 10:04:02 -07:00
ipc Merge branch 'work.mount' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2019-03-12 14:08:19 -07:00
kernel Merge branch 'smp-urgent-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2019-03-31 08:22:12 -07:00
lib for-linus-20190329 2019-03-29 14:43:07 -07:00
LICENSES LICENSES: Add GCC runtime library exception text 2019-01-16 14:54:15 -07:00
mm mm/migrate.c: add missing flush_dcache_page for non-mapped page migrate 2019-03-29 10:01:37 -07:00
net A patch to avoid choking on multipage bvecs in the messenger and 2019-03-29 14:41:09 -07:00
samples Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net 2019-03-11 08:54:01 -07:00
scripts unicode: reduce the size of utf8data[] 2019-04-25 13:49:18 -04:00
security LSM: Revive CONFIG_DEFAULT_SECURITY_* for "make oldconfig" 2019-03-29 14:08:49 -07:00
sound sound fixes for 5.1-rc3 2019-03-29 14:53:33 -07:00
tools A collection of x86 and ARM bugfixes, and some improvements to documentation. 2019-03-31 08:55:59 -07:00
usr user/Makefile: Fix typo and capitalization in comment section 2018-12-11 00:18:03 +09:00
virt KVM/ARM fixes for 5.1 2019-03-28 19:07:30 +01:00
.clang-format Merge branch 'work.iov_iter' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2019-03-12 13:43:42 -07:00
.cocciconfig
.get_maintainer.ignore
.gitattributes .gitattributes: set git diff driver for C source code files 2016-10-07 18:46:30 -07:00
.gitignore kbuild: Add support for DT binding schema checks 2018-12-13 09:41:32 -06:00
.mailmap mailmap: add Changbin Du 2019-03-29 10:01:37 -07:00
COPYING COPYING: use the new text with points to the license files 2018-03-23 12:41:45 -06:00
CREDITS Char/Misc driver patches for 5.1-rc1 2019-03-06 14:18:59 -08:00
Kbuild Kbuild updates for v5.1 2019-03-10 17:48:21 -07:00
Kconfig kconfig: move the "Executable file formats" menu to fs/Kconfig.binfmt 2018-08-02 08:06:55 +09:00
MAINTAINERS MAINTAINERS: add Unicode subsystem entry 2019-04-25 13:59:56 -04:00
Makefile Linux 5.1-rc3 2019-03-31 14:39:29 -07:00
README Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/ 2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.