Re: [PATCH 2/2] dax: fix bdev NULL pointer dereferences

[Dan Williams]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 2:55 AM, Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 11:12:12PM -0700, Ross Zwisler wrote:
>> > I did probably 70% of the work needed to switch the radix tree over to
>> > storing PFNs instead of sectors.  It seems viable, though it's a big
>> > change from where we are today:
>>
>> At one point I had kaddrs in the radix tree, so I could just pull the addresses out
>> and flush them.  That would save us a pfn -> kaddrs conversion before flush.
>>
>> Is there a reason to store pnfs instead of kaddrs in the radix tree?
>
> Once ARM, MIPS and SPARC get supported, they're going to need temporary
> kernel addresses assigned to PFNs rather than permanent ones.  Also,
> it'll be easier for teardown to delete PFNs associated with a particular
> device than kaddrs associated with a particular device.  And it lets
> us support more persistent memory on a 32-bit machine (also on a 64-bit
> machine, but that's mostly theoretical)
>
> +/*
> + * DAX uses the 'exceptional' entries to store PFNs in the radix tree.
> + * Bit 0 is clear (the radix tree uses this for its own purposes).  Bit
> + * 1 is set (to indicate an exceptional entry).  Bits 2 & 3 are PFN_DEV
> + * and PFN_MAP.  The top two bits denote the size of the entry (PTE, PMD,
> + * PUD, one reserved).  That leaves us 26 bits on 32-bit systems and 58
> + * bits on 64-bit systems, able to address 256GB and 1024EB respectively.
> + */
>
> It's also pretty cheap to look up the kaddr from the pfn, at least on
> 64-bit architectures without cache aliasing problems:
>
> +static void *dax_map_pfn(pfn_t pfn, unsigned long index)
> +{
> +       preempt_disable();
> +       pagefault_disable();
> +       return pfn_to_kaddr(pfn_t_to_pfn(pfn));

pfn_to_kaddr() assumes persistent memory is direct mapped which is not
always the case.