Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org designates 209.132.180.67 as permitted sender) client-ip=209.132.180.67;
Date:   Mon, 4 Feb 2019 16:08:02 +0000
From:   Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>
To:     john.hubbard@gmail.com
cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
        Christian Benvenuti <benve@cisco.com>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>,
        Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>,
        Dennis Dalessandro <dennis.dalessandro@intel.com>,
        Doug Ledford <dledford@redhat.com>, Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>,
        Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ziepe.ca>,
        Jerome Glisse <jglisse@redhat.com>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>,
        Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>,
        Mike Marciniszyn <mike.marciniszyn@intel.com>,
        Ralph Campbell <rcampbell@nvidia.com>,
        Tom Talpey <tom@talpey.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] RFC v2: mm: gup/dma tracking
In-Reply-To: <20190204052135.25784-1-jhubbard@nvidia.com>
Message-ID: <01000168b94439c0-28d5e096-718d-4e39-a7af-20d0a6d7b768-000000@email.amazonses.com>
References: <20190204052135.25784-1-jhubbard@nvidia.com>
User-Agent: Alpine 2.21 (DEB 202 2017-01-01)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Feedback-ID: 1.us-east-1.fQZZZ0Xtj2+TD7V5apTT/NrT6QKuPgzCT/IC7XYgDKI=:AmazonSES
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Precedence: bulk

On Sun, 3 Feb 2019, john.hubbard@gmail.com wrote:

> Some kernel components (file systems, device drivers) need to access
> memory that is specified via process virtual address. For a long time, the
> API to achieve that was get_user_pages ("GUP") and its variations. However,
> GUP has critical limitations that have been overlooked; in particular, GUP
> does not interact correctly with filesystems in all situations. That means
> that file-backed memory + GUP is a recipe for potential problems, some of
> which have already occurred in the field.

It may be worth noting a couple of times in this text that this was
designed for anonymous memory and that such use is/was ok. We are talking
about a use case here using mmapped access with a regular filesystem that
was not initially intended. The mmapping of from the hugepages filesystem
is special in that it is not a device that is actually writing things
back.

Any use with a filesystem that actually writes data back to a medium
is something that is broken.