Re: [PATCH v7 05/19] iov_iter: Introduce fault_in_iov_iter_writeable

From: Al Viro
Date: Fri Aug 27 2021 - 17:57:23 EST


On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 09:48:55PM +0000, Al Viro wrote:

> [btrfs]search_ioctl()
> Broken with memory poisoning, for either variant of semantics. Same for
> arm64 sub-page permission differences, I think.


> So we have 3 callers where we want all-or-nothing semantics - two in
> arch/x86/kernel/fpu/signal.c and one in btrfs. HWPOISON will be a problem
> for all 3, AFAICS...
>
> IOW, it looks like we have two different things mixed here - one that wants
> to try and fault stuff in, with callers caring only about having _something_
> faulted in (most of the users) and one that wants to make sure we *can* do
> stores or loads on each byte in the affected area.
>
> Just accessing a byte in each page really won't suffice for the second kind.
> Neither will g-u-p use, unless we teach it about HWPOISON and other fun
> beasts... Looks like we want that thing to be a separate primitive; for
> btrfs I'd probably replace fault_in_pages_writeable() with clear_user()
> as a quick fix for now...
>
> Comments?

Wait a sec... Wasn't HWPOISON a per-page thing? arm64 definitely does have
smaller-than-page areas with different permissions, so btrfs search_ioctl()
has a problem there, but arch/x86/kernel/fpu/signal.c doesn't have to deal
with that...

Sigh... I really need more coffee...