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Date:   Wed, 23 Dec 2020 20:34:00 -0700
From:   Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com>
To:     Nadav Amit <nadav.amit@gmail.com>
Cc:     Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>, linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        lkml <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org>,
        Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@oracle.com>,
        Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        stable <stable@vger.kernel.org>,
        Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>,
        Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm/userfaultfd: fix memory corruption due to writeprotect
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On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 07:09:10PM -0800, Nadav Amit wrote:
> > On Dec 23, 2020, at 6:00 PM, Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 05:21:43PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> >> I don’t love this as a long term fix. AFAICT we can have mm_tlb_flush_pending set for quite a while — mprotect seems like it can wait in IO while splitting a huge page, for example. That gives us a window in which every write fault turns into a TLB flush.
> > 
> > mprotect can't run concurrently with a page fault in the first place.
> > 
> > One other near zero cost improvement easy to add if this would be "if
> > (vma->vm_flags & (VM_SOFTDIRTY|VM_UFFD_WP))" and it could be made
> > conditional to the two config options too.
> > 
> > Still I don't mind doing it in some other way, uffd-wp has much easier
> > time doing it in another way in fact.
> > 
> > Whatever performs better is fine, but queuing up pending invalidate
> > ranges don't look very attractive since it'd be a fixed cost that we'd
> > always have to pay even when there's no fault (and there can't be any
> > fault at least for mprotect).
> 
> I think there are other cases in which Andy’s concern is relevant
> (MADV_PAGEOUT).

That patch only demonstrate a rough idea and I should have been
elaborate: if we ever decide to go that direction, we only need to
worry about "jumping through hoops", because the final patch (set)
I have in mind would not only have the build time optimization Andrea
suggested but also include runtime optimizations like skipping
do_swap_page() path and (!PageAnon() || page_mapcount > 1). Rest
assured, the performance impact on do_wp_page() from occasionally an
additional TLB flush on top of a page copy is negligible.

> Perhaps holding some small bitmap based on part of the deferred flushed
> pages (e.g., bits 12-17 of the address or some other kind of a single
> hash-function bloom-filter) would be more performant to avoid (most)
> unnecessary TLB flushes. It will be cleared before a TLB flush and set while
> holding the PTL.
> 
> Checking if a flush is needed, under the PTL, would require a single memory
> access (although potentially cache miss). It will however require one atomic
> operation for each page-table whose PTEs’ flushes are deferred - in contrast
> to the current scheme which requires two atomic operations for the *entire*
> operation.
>