Re: [PATCH v8 2/2] mm: remove zap_page_range and change callers to use zap_vma_range

[Nadav Amit]

On Nov 10, 2022, at 1:27 PM, Peter Xu <peterx@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi, Nadav,
> 
> On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 01:09:43PM -0800, Nadav Amit wrote:
>> But, are the callers really able to guarantee that the ranges are all in a
>> single VMA? I am not familiar with the users, but how for instance
>> tcp_zerocopy_receive() can guarantee that no one did some mprotect() of some
>> sorts that caused the original VMA to be split?
> 
> Let me try to answer this one for Mike..  We have two callers in tcp
> zerocopy code for this function:
> 
> tcp_zerocopy_vm_insert_batch_error[2095] zap_page_range(vma, *address, maybe_zap_len);
> tcp_zerocopy_receive[2237]     zap_page_range(vma, address, total_bytes_to_map);
> 
> Both of them take the mmap lock for read, so firstly mprotect is not
> possible.
> 
> The 1st call has:
> 
> 	mmap_read_lock(current->mm);
> 
> 	vma = vma_lookup(current->mm, address);
> 	if (!vma || vma->vm_ops != &tcp_vm_ops) {
> 		mmap_read_unlock(current->mm);
> 		return -EINVAL;
> 	}
> 	vma_len = min_t(unsigned long, zc->length, vma->vm_end - address);
> 	avail_len = min_t(u32, vma_len, inq);
> 	total_bytes_to_map = avail_len & ~(PAGE_SIZE - 1);
> 	if (total_bytes_to_map) {
> 		if (!(zc->flags & TCP_RECEIVE_ZEROCOPY_FLAG_TLB_CLEAN_HINT))
> 			zap_page_range(vma, address, total_bytes_to_map);
> 
> Here total_bytes_to_map comes from avail_len <--- vma_len, which is a min()
> of the rest vma range.  So total_bytes_to_map will never go beyond the vma.
> 
> The 2nd call uses maybe_zap_len as len, we need to look two layers of the
> callers, but ultimately it's something smaller than total_bytes_to_map we
> discussed.  Hopefully it proves 100% safety on tcp zerocopy.

Thanks Peter for the detailed explanation.

I had another look at the code and indeed it should not break. I am not sure
whether users who zero-copy receive and mprotect() part of the memory would
not be surprised, but I guess that’s a different story, which I should
further study at some point.