vfs: make sure struct filename->iname is word-aligned

I noticed that offsetof(struct filename, iname) is actually 28 on 64
bit platforms, so we always pass an unaligned pointer to
strncpy_from_user. This is mostly a problem for those 64 bit platforms
without HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS, but even on x86_64, unaligned
accesses carry a penalty.

A user-space microbenchmark doing nothing but strncpy_from_user from the
same (aligned) source string runs about 5% faster when the destination
is aligned. That number increases to 20% when the string is long
enough (~32 bytes) that we cross a cache line boundary - that's for
example the case for about half the files a "git status" in a kernel
tree ends up stat'ing.

This won't make any real-life workloads 5%, or even 1%, faster, but path
lookup is common enough that cutting even a few cycles should be
worthwhile. So ensure we always pass an aligned destination pointer to
strncpy_from_user. Instead of explicit padding, simply swap the refcnt
and aname members, as suggested by Al Viro.

Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>

diff --git a/fs/namei.c b/fs/namei.c
index 921ae32dbc8053813e70b2a6454bf7dc4f85306a..5a66e7ca5d608f68bcfac88b3ba41b8dd160e038 100644 (file)
--- a/fs/namei.c
+++ b/fs/namei.c
@@ -39,6 +39,7 @@
 #include <linux/bitops.h>
 #include <linux/init_task.h>
 #include <linux/uaccess.h>
+#include <linux/build_bug.h>
 
 #include "internal.h"
 #include "mount.h"
@@ -130,6 +131,7 @@ getname_flags(const char __user *filename, int flags, int *empty)
        struct filename *result;
        char *kname;
        int len;
+       BUILD_BUG_ON(offsetof(struct filename, iname) % sizeof(long) != 0);
 
        result = audit_reusename(filename);
        if (result)

diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index 2a815560fda0e162c5c27da8249b9f3921328c21..d7b2caadb2921a8685219dc297a2ab43e61df6f0 100644 (file)
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -2380,8 +2380,8 @@ struct audit_names;
 struct filename {
        const char              *name;  /* pointer to actual string */
        const __user char       *uptr;  /* original userland pointer */
-       struct audit_names      *aname;
        int                     refcnt;
+       struct audit_names      *aname;
        const char              iname[];
 };