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Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/3] mm/filemap: initiate readahead even if IOCB_NOWAIT is
 set for the I/O
To:     Daniel Gruss <daniel@gruss.cc>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc:     linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        linux-api@vger.kernel.org, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>, Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>,
        Dominique Martinet <asmadeus@codewreck.org>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>,
        Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>,
        Kevin Easton <kevin@guarana.org>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        Cyril Hrubis <chrubis@suse.cz>, Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>,
        "Kirill A . Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>,
        Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>
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From:   Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
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Date:   Thu, 31 Jan 2019 13:06:58 +0100
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On 1/31/19 1:04 PM, Daniel Gruss wrote:
> On 1/30/19 1:44 PM, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
>> Close that sidechannel by always initiating readahead on the cache if we
>> encounter a cache miss for preadv2(RWF_NOWAIT); with that in place, probing
>> the pagecache residency itself will actually populate the cache, making the
>> sidechannel useless.
> 
> I fear this does not really close the side channel. You can time the
> preadv2 function and infer which path it took, so you just bring it down
> to the same as using mmap and timing accesses.
> If I understood it correctly, this patch just removes the advantages of
> preadv2 over mmmap+access for the attacker.

But isn't that the same with mincore()? We can't simply remove the
possibility of mmap+access, but we are closing the simpler methods?

Vlastimil


> Cheers,
> Daniel
>