FS-VERITY Seeing Performance Enhancements With Linux 5.6

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 2 February 2020 at 12:27 PM EST. 1 Comment
LINUX STORAGE
FS-VERITY came in Linux 5.4 as a means of transparent integrity and authenticity support for read-only files. This Google creation is seeing better performance with Linux 5.6.

FS-VERITY is similar to the existing Linux dm-verity for authenticity protection but works at the file level rather than block level. FS-VERITY can be used currently with the likes of EXT4 and F2FS file-systems. Google has been working on this native file authenticity support for use on Android devices where as in the past they have used dm-verity for verifying system images, among other possible use-cases.

FS-VERITY in Linux 5.6 is seeing better sequential read performance thanks to a readahead implementation for the Merkle tree pages to be read in larger chunks. Meanwhile the FS_IOC_ENABLE_VERITY performance is better thanks to a readahead implementation for data pages. Rounding out the FS-VERITY work for Linux 5.6 is an improvement to avoid possible allocation failures during I/O. More details with this Git merge.


The FS-VERITY presentation above goes over more about this file authentication kernel framework.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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