Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753431AbZK1Su7 (ORCPT ); Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:50:59 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753149AbZK1Su7 (ORCPT ); Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:50:59 -0500 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:32358 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753066AbZK1Su6 (ORCPT ); Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:50:58 -0500 Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:50:52 +0100 From: Andrea Arcangeli To: Hugh Dickins Cc: Mark Veltzer , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andi Kleen , KOSAKI Motohiro , Michael Kerrisk , Nick Piggin Subject: Re: get_user_pages question Message-ID: <20091128185052.GB30235@random.random> References: <200911090850.26724.mark.veltzer@gmail.com> <87skco59jl.fsf@basil.nowhere.org> <200911100013.31768.mark.veltzer@gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 4586 Lines: 86 Hi Hugh and everyone, On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 04:33:30PM +0000, Hugh Dickins wrote: > In fairness I've added Andrea and KOSAKI-san to the Cc, since I know > they are two people keen to fix this issue once and for all. Whereas Right, I'm sure Nick also wants to fix this once and for all (adding him too to Cc ;). I thought and I still think it's bad to leave races like this open for people to find out the hard way. It just takes somebody to use pthread_create, open a file with O_DIRECT with 512byte (not page alignment) and call fork to trigger this, and they may find out only later after going productive on thousand of servers... If this was a too hard problem to fix I would understand, but I've all patches ready to fix this completely! And they're quite localized they only touch fork and gup and they don't alter the fast path (except for 1 conditional jump in fork that surely is lost in the noise, plus fork is all but a fast path). I tried to fix this in RHEL but eventually the user affected added larger alignment to the userland app to prevent this, so it isn't as urgent anymore and so I'd rather prefer to fix this in mainline first. This isn't the first and surely won't be the last user that is bitten by this, unless we take action. > I am with Linus in the opposite camp: solutions have looked nasty, > and short of bright new ideas, I feel we've gone as far as we ought. There are two gup races that materializes when we wrprotect and share an anonymous page. bug 1) If a parent thread writes to the first half of the page while the gup user writes to the second half of the page and then fork is run, the O_DIRECT read from disk in the second half of the page gets lost. In addition the child will still receive the O_DIRECT writes to memory when it should not. bug 2) The backward race happens after fork, when the parent starts an O_DIRECT write to disk from the first half of the page, and then writes to memory in the second half of the page, after that the child writes to the page will be read by the parent direct-io. fix for bug 1) is what Nick and me implemented, that consists in copying (instead of sharing) anon pages during fork, if they could be under gup. The two implementations are vastly different but they look to do the same thing (he used bitflags in the vma and in the page, I only used a bitflag in the page, worst thing of my patch was having to set that bitflag in gup_fast too, I don't like having to add a bit to the vma when a bit in the page is enough). fix A for bug 2) is what KOSAKI tried to implement in message-id 20090414151554.C64A.A69D9226. The trick is in having do_wp_page not taking over a page under GUP (that means reuse_swap_cache has to take the page_count into account too, not just the mapcount). However taking page_count into account in reuse_swap_cache, means that it won't be capable of taking over a page under gup that got temporarily converted to swapcache and unmapped, so leading to losing O_DIRECT reads from disk during paging. So another change is required to rmap code to prevent ever unmapping any pinned anon page that could be under GUP to avoid losing I/O during paging. fix B for bug 2) is what Nick and me implemented, that consists in always de-cowing anon shared pages during gup even in case of gup(write=0). That's much simpler than fix A for bug 2 and the fix doesn't affect rmap swap semantics, but it loses some sharing capability in gup(write=0) cases, not a practical matter though. All other patches floating around spread an mm-wide semaphore over fork fast path, and across O_DIRECT, nfs, and aio, and they most certainly didn't fix the two races for all gup users, and they weren't stable because of having to identify the closure of the I/O across all possible put_page. That approach kind of opens a can of worms and it looks the wrong way to go to me, and I think they scale worse too for the fast path (no O_DIRECT or no fork). Identifying the gup closure points and replacing the raw put_page with gup_put_page would not be an useless effort though and I felt if the gup API was just a little bit more sophisticated I could simplify a bit the put_compound_page to serialize the race against split_huge_page_refcount, but this is an orthogonal issue with the mm-wide semaphore release addition which I personally dislike. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/