Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2016 10:10:06 +0100
From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
To: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Cc: Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@google.com>,
        Felipe Balbi <balbi@kernel.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
        Marek Szyprowski <m.szyprowski@samsung.com>,
        Deepa Dinamani <deepa.kernel@gmail.com>,
        Mathieu Laurendeau <mat.lau@laposte.net>, Bin Liu <b-liu@ti.com>,
        USB list <linux-usb@vger.kernel.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        syzkaller <syzkaller@googlegroups.com>,
        Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>, Kostya Serebryany <kcc@google.com>,
        Cristopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Subject: Re: usb/gadget: warning in ep_write_iter/__alloc_pages_nodemask
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On Tue 13-12-16 08:33:34, Alan Stern wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Dec 2016, Michal Hocko wrote:
> 
> > > > That being said, what ep_write_iter does sounds quite stupit. It just
> > > > allocates a large continuous buffer which seems to be under user
> > > > control...  Aka no good! It should do that per pages or something like
> > > > that. Something worth fixing
> > > 
> > > It's not important enough to make the driver do all this work.  If
> > > users want to send large amounts of data, they can send it a page at a
> > > time (or something like that).
> > 
> > Is it really necessary to allocate the full iov_iter_count? Why cannot
> > we process the from buffer one page at a time?
> 
> We could (although one page is really too small -- USB 3.1 can transfer
> 800 KB per ms so we ought to handle at least 128 KB at a time).

Is there any problem to submit larger transfers without having the
buffer physically contiguous?

> But
> turn the argument around: If the user wants to transfer that much data,
> why can't he _submit_ it one page at a time?

Not sure I understand.
 
> > > If you really want to prevent the driver from attempting to allocate a
> > > large buffer, all that's needed is an upper limit on the total size.  
> > > For example, 64 KB.
> > 
> > Well, my point was that it is not really hard to imagine to deplete
> > larger contiguous memory blocks (say PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER). Those are
> > still causing the OOM killer and chances are that a controlled flood of
> > these requests could completely DoS the system.
> 
> Putting a limit on the total size of a single transfer would prevent 
> this.

Dunno, putting a limit to the user visible interface sounds wrong to me.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs