[PATCH] x86: mm: get rid of conditional IF flag handling in page fault path

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Thu Jan 25 2024 - 12:35:09 EST


We had this nonsensical code that would happily handle kernel page
faults with interrupts disabled, which makes no sense at all.

It turns out that this is legacy code that _used_ to make sense, back
when we enabled irqs as early as possible, and we used to have this code
sequence essentially immediately after reading the faulting address from
register %cr2.

Back then, we could have kernel page faults to populate the vmalloc area
with interrupts disabled, and they would need to stay disabled for that
case.

However, the code in question has been moved down in the page fault
handling, and is now in the "handle faults in user addresses" section,
and apparently nobody ever noticed that it no longer makes sense to
handle these page faults with interrupts conditionally disabled.

So replace the conditional irq enable

if (regs->flags & X86_EFLAGS_IF)
local_irq_enable();

with an unconditional one, and add a temporary WARN_ON_ONCE() if some
codepath actually does do page faults with interrupts disabled (without
also doing a pagefault_disable(), of course).

NOTE! We used to allow user space to disable interrupts with iopl(3).
That is no longer true since commits

a24ca9976843 ("x86/iopl: Remove legacy IOPL option")
b968e84b509d ("x86/iopl: Fake iopl(3) CLI/STI usage")

so the WARN_ON_ONCE() is valid for both the kernel and user situation.

For some of the history relevant to this code, see particularly commit
8c914cb704a1 ("x86_64: actively synchronize vmalloc area when
registering certain callbacks") which moved this below the vmalloc fault
handling.

Now that the user_mode() check is irrelevant, we can also move the
FAULT_FLAG_USER flag setting down to where the other flag settings are
done.

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
arch/x86/mm/fault.c | 27 ++++++++++++++-------------
1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/x86/mm/fault.c b/arch/x86/mm/fault.c
index 679b09cfe241..150e002e0884 100644
--- a/arch/x86/mm/fault.c
+++ b/arch/x86/mm/fault.c
@@ -1302,21 +1302,14 @@ void do_user_addr_fault(struct pt_regs *regs,
return;
}

- /*
- * It's safe to allow irq's after cr2 has been saved and the
- * vmalloc fault has been handled.
- *
- * User-mode registers count as a user access even for any
- * potential system fault or CPU buglet:
- */
- if (user_mode(regs)) {
- local_irq_enable();
- flags |= FAULT_FLAG_USER;
- } else {
- if (regs->flags & X86_EFLAGS_IF)
- local_irq_enable();
+ /* Legacy check - remove this after verifying that it doesn't trigger */
+ if (WARN_ON_ONCE(!(regs->flags & X86_EFLAGS_IF))) {
+ bad_area_nosemaphore(regs, error_code, address);
+ return;
}

+ local_irq_enable();
+
perf_sw_event(PERF_COUNT_SW_PAGE_FAULTS, 1, regs, address);

/*
@@ -1332,6 +1325,14 @@ void do_user_addr_fault(struct pt_regs *regs,
if (error_code & X86_PF_INSTR)
flags |= FAULT_FLAG_INSTRUCTION;

+ /*
+ * We set FAULT_FLAG_USER based on the register state, not
+ * based on X86_PF_USER. User space accesses that cause
+ * system page faults are still user accesses.
+ */
+ if (user_mode(regs))
+ flags |= FAULT_FLAG_USER;
+
#ifdef CONFIG_X86_64
/*
* Faults in the vsyscall page might need emulation. The
--
2.43.0.5.g38fb137bdb