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

From: Will Deacon
Date: Tue Jan 12 2021 - 16:45:06 EST


On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 12:38:34PM -0800, Nadav Amit wrote:
> > On Jan 12, 2021, at 11:56 AM, Yu Zhao <yuzhao@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 11:15:43AM -0800, Nadav Amit wrote:
> >> I will send an RFC soon for per-table deferred TLB flushes tracking.
> >> The basic idea is to save a generation in the page-struct that tracks
> >> when deferred PTE change took place, and track whenever a TLB flush
> >> completed. In addition, other users - such as mprotect - would use
> >> the tlb_gather interface.
> >>
> >> Unfortunately, due to limited space in page-struct this would only
> >> be possible for 64-bit (and my implementation is only for x86-64).
> >
> > I don't want to discourage you but I don't think this would end up
> > well. PPC doesn't necessarily follow one-page-struct-per-table rule,
> > and I've run into problems with this before while trying to do
> > something similar.
>
> Discourage, discourage. Better now than later.
>
> It will be relatively easy to extend the scheme to be per-VMA instead of
> per-table for architectures that prefer it this way. It does require
> TLB-generation tracking though, which Andy only implemented for x86, so I
> will focus on x86-64 right now.

Can you remind me of what we're missing on arm64 in this area, please? I'm
happy to help get this up and running once you have something I can build
on.

Will