Ceph » CephFS

A client is allowed to set as many xattrs in an inode as it wants, as long as it has CAP_XATTR_EXCL. This will allow him to buffer the xattrs and send them to the MDS later on. This will eventually result in crashing the MDS (and possibly also requires recovering the filesystem?).

There was an attempt long time ago to fix this in https://tracker.ceph.com/issues/19033, which resulted in commit eb915d0eeccb ("cephfs: fix write_buf's _len overflow problem"). This fix added a maximum size for the xattrs (keys + values). But this maximum is only enforced when a client uses the synchronous MDS_OP_SETXATTR operation.

Here's a small test case:

# dd if=/dev/zero bs=1 count=65536 2> /dev/null | attr -s myattr /mnt/myfile
attr_set: No space left on device
Could not set "myattr" for /mnt/myfile
# dd if=/dev/zero bs=1 count=65536 2> /dev/null | attr -s myattr /mnt/myfile
Attribute "myattr" set to a 65536 byte value for /mnt/myfile:

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