Re: [PATCH] mm/userfaultfd: fix memory corruption due to writeprotect

From: Andrea Arcangeli
Date: Wed Dec 23 2020 - 21:02:19 EST


On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 05:21:43PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> I don’t love this as a long term fix. AFAICT we can have mm_tlb_flush_pending set for quite a while — mprotect seems like it can wait in IO while splitting a huge page, for example. That gives us a window in which every write fault turns into a TLB flush.

mprotect can't run concurrently with a page fault in the first place.

One other near zero cost improvement easy to add if this would be "if
(vma->vm_flags & (VM_SOFTDIRTY|VM_UFFD_WP))" and it could be made
conditional to the two config options too.

Still I don't mind doing it in some other way, uffd-wp has much easier
time doing it in another way in fact.

Whatever performs better is fine, but queuing up pending invalidate
ranges don't look very attractive since it'd be a fixed cost that we'd
always have to pay even when there's no fault (and there can't be any
fault at least for mprotect).

Thanks,
Andrea