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authorBenjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>2011-07-25 17:12:32 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2011-07-25 20:57:11 -0700
commit2efaca927f5cd7ecd0f1554b8f9b6a9a2c329c03 (patch)
tree1bea042a7c712e861d7734db59b3311375c439c3 /kernel/time
parent72c4783210f77fd743f0a316858d33f27db51e7c (diff)
mm/futex: fix futex writes on archs with SW tracking of dirty & young
I haven't reproduced it myself but the fail scenario is that on such machines (notably ARM and some embedded powerpc), if you manage to hit that futex path on a writable page whose dirty bit has gone from the PTE, you'll livelock inside the kernel from what I can tell. It will go in a loop of trying the atomic access, failing, trying gup to "fix it up", getting succcess from gup, go back to the atomic access, failing again because dirty wasn't fixed etc... So I think you essentially hang in the kernel. The scenario is probably rare'ish because affected architecture are embedded and tend to not swap much (if at all) so we probably rarely hit the case where dirty is missing or young is missing, but I think Shan has a piece of SW that can reliably reproduce it using a shared writable mapping & fork or something like that. On archs who use SW tracking of dirty & young, a page without dirty is effectively mapped read-only and a page without young unaccessible in the PTE. Additionally, some architectures might lazily flush the TLB when relaxing write protection (by doing only a local flush), and expect a fault to invalidate the stale entry if it's still present on another processor. The futex code assumes that if the "in_atomic()" access -EFAULT's, it can "fix it up" by causing get_user_pages() which would then be equivalent to taking the fault. However that isn't the case. get_user_pages() will not call handle_mm_fault() in the case where the PTE seems to have the right permissions, regardless of the dirty and young state. It will eventually update those bits ... in the struct page, but not in the PTE. Additionally, it will not handle the lazy TLB flushing that can be required by some architectures in the fault case. Basically, gup is the wrong interface for the job. The patch provides a more appropriate one which boils down to just calling handle_mm_fault() since what we are trying to do is simulate a real page fault. The futex code currently attempts to write to user memory within a pagefault disabled section, and if that fails, tries to fix it up using get_user_pages(). This doesn't work on archs where the dirty and young bits are maintained by software, since they will gate access permission in the TLB, and will not be updated by gup(). In addition, there's an expectation on some archs that a spurious write fault triggers a local TLB flush, and that is missing from the picture as well. I decided that adding those "features" to gup() would be too much for this already too complex function, and instead added a new simpler fixup_user_fault() which is essentially a wrapper around handle_mm_fault() which the futex code can call. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix some nits Darren saw, fiddle comment layout] Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> Reported-by: Shan Hai <haishan.bai@gmail.com> Tested-by: Shan Hai <haishan.bai@gmail.com> Cc: David Laight <David.Laight@ACULAB.COM> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Cc: Darren Hart <darren.hart@intel.com> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'kernel/time')
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