Re: [PATCH v9 0/3] mm/gup: disallow GUP writing to file-backed mappings by default

[Lorenzo Stoakes]

On Thu, May 04, 2023 at 10:27:50PM +0100, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
> Writing to file-backed mappings which require folio dirty tracking using
> GUP is a fundamentally broken operation, as kernel write access to GUP
> mappings do not adhere to the semantics expected by a file system.
>
> A GUP caller uses the direct mapping to access the folio, which does not
> cause write notify to trigger, nor does it enforce that the caller marks
> the folio dirty.
>
> The problem arises when, after an initial write to the folio, writeback
> results in the folio being cleaned and then the caller, via the GUP
> interface, writes to the folio again.
>
> As a result of the use of this secondary, direct, mapping to the folio no
> write notify will occur, and if the caller does mark the folio dirty, this
> will be done so unexpectedly.
>
> For example, consider the following scenario:-
>
> 1. A folio is written to via GUP which write-faults the memory, notifying
>    the file system and dirtying the folio.
> 2. Later, writeback is triggered, resulting in the folio being cleaned and
>    the PTE being marked read-only.
> 3. The GUP caller writes to the folio, as it is mapped read/write via the
>    direct mapping.
> 4. The GUP caller, now done with the page, unpins it and sets it dirty
>    (though it does not have to).
>
> This change updates both the PUP FOLL_LONGTERM slow and fast APIs. As
> pin_user_pages_fast_only() does not exist, we can rely on a slightly
> imperfect whitelisting in the PUP-fast case and fall back to the slow case
> should this fail.
[snip]

As discussed at LSF/MM, on the flight over I wrote a little repro [0] which
reliably triggers the ext4 warning by recreating the scenario described
above, using a small userland program and kernel module.

This code is not perfect (plane code :) but does seem to do the job
adequately, also obviously this should only be run in a VM environment
where data loss is acceptable (in my case a small qemu instance).

Hopefully this is useful in some way. Note that I explicitly use
pin_user_pages() without FOLL_LONGTERM here in order to not run into the
mitigation this very patch series provides! Obviously if you revert this
series you can see the same happening with FOLL_LONGTERM set.

I have licensed the code as GPLv2 so anybody's free to do with it as they
will if it's useful in any way!

[0]:https://github.com/lorenzo-stoakes/gup-repro