Re: [PATCH V2] mm: fix use-after free of page_ext after race with memory-offline

[Charan Teja Kalla]

Thanks Michal !!

On 8/1/2022 1:57 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
>> Currently not all the places where page_ext is being used is put under
>> the rcu_lock. I just used rcu lock in the places where it is possible to
>> have the use-after-free of page_ext. You recommend to use rcu lock while
>> using with page_ext in all the places?
> Yes. Using locking inconsistently just begs for future problems. There
> should be a very good reason to use lockless approach in some paths and
> that would be where the locking overhead is not really acceptable or
> when the locking cannot be used for other reasons.
> 
> RCU read lock is essentially zero overhead so the only reason would be
> that the critical section would require to sleep. Is any of that the
> case?
> 
> If there is a real need to have a lockless variant then I would propose
> to add __page_ext_get/put which would be lockless and clearly documented
> under which contexts it can be used and enfore those condictions (e.g.
> reference count assumption).
> 

Let me try to use a single interface here.

>> The roll back operation in the online_page_ext(), where we free the
>> allocated page_ext's, will not have the PAGE_EXT_INVALID flag thus
>> WARN() may not work here. no?
> Wouldn't ms->page_ext be NULL in that case?
I don't think that ms->page_ext would be NULL here.
online_page_ext():
  (a) for (pfn = start; !fail && pfn < end; pfn += PAGES_PER_SECTION)
     fail = init_section_page_ext():
	   ms->page_ext = (void *)base - page_ext_size * pfn;

  //If fail = -ERROR in the middle, roll back operation.
  (b) for (pfn = start; pfn < end; pfn += PAGES_PER_SECTION)
       __free_page_ext();

   Here (b) can be called on the sections without PAGE_EXT_INVALID with
ms->page_ext != NULL.

Thanks,
Charan