dm verity: add support for forward error correction

Add support for correcting corrupted blocks using Reed-Solomon.

This code uses RS(255, N) interleaved across data and hash
blocks. Each error-correcting block covers N bytes evenly
distributed across the combined total data, so that each byte is a
maximum distance away from the others. This makes it possible to
recover from several consecutive corrupted blocks with relatively
small space overhead.

In addition, using verity hashes to locate erasures nearly doubles
the effectiveness of error correction. Being able to detect
corrupted blocks also improves performance, because only corrupted
blocks need to corrected.

For a 2 GiB partition, RS(255, 253) (two parity bytes for each
253-byte block) can correct up to 16 MiB of consecutive corrupted
blocks if erasures can be located, and 8 MiB if they cannot, with
16 MiB space overhead.

Signed-off-by: Sami Tolvanen <samitolvanen@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 33 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/device-mapper/verity.txt b/Documentation/device-mapper/verity.txt
index e15bc1a..d602c80 100644
--- a/Documentation/device-mapper/verity.txt
+++ b/Documentation/device-mapper/verity.txt
@@ -18,11 +18,11 @@ Construction Parameters
 
     0 is the original format used in the Chromium OS.
       The salt is appended when hashing, digests are stored continuously and
-      the rest of the block is padded with zeros.
+      the rest of the block is padded with zeroes.
 
     1 is the current format that should be used for new devices.
       The salt is prepended when hashing and each digest is
-      padded with zeros to the power of two.
+      padded with zeroes to the power of two.
 
 <dev>
     This is the device containing data, the integrity of which needs to be
@@ -79,6 +79,32 @@ restart_on_corruption
     not compatible with ignore_corruption and requires user space support to
     avoid restart loops.
 
+use_fec_from_device <fec_dev>
+    Use forward error correction (FEC) to recover from corruption if hash
+    verification fails. Use encoding data from the specified device. This
+    may be the same device where data and hash blocks reside, in which case
+    fec_start must be outside data and hash areas.
+
+    If the encoding data covers additional metadata, it must be accessible
+    on the hash device after the hash blocks.
+
+    Note: block sizes for data and hash devices must match. Also, if the
+    verity <dev> is encrypted the <fec_dev> should be too.
+
+fec_roots <num>
+    Number of generator roots. This equals to the number of parity bytes in
+    the encoding data. For example, in RS(M, N) encoding, the number of roots
+    is M-N.
+
+fec_blocks <num>
+    The number of encoding data blocks on the FEC device. The block size for
+    the FEC device is <data_block_size>.
+
+fec_start <offset>
+    This is the offset, in <data_block_size> blocks, from the start of the
+    FEC device to the beginning of the encoding data.
+
+
 Theory of operation
 ===================
 
@@ -98,6 +124,11 @@ per-block basis. This allows for a lightweight hash computation on first read
 into the page cache. Block hashes are stored linearly, aligned to the nearest
 block size.
 
+If forward error correction (FEC) support is enabled any recovery of
+corrupted data will be verified using the cryptographic hash of the
+corresponding data. This is why combining error correction with
+integrity checking is essential.
+
 Hash Tree
 ---------