Re: [PATCH] mm: larger stack guard gap, between vmas

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 9:58 AM, Ben Hutchings <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I ended up with the following two patches, which seem to deal with
> both the Java and Rust regressions.  These don't touch the
> stack-grows-up paths at all because Rust doesn't run on those
> architectures and the Java weirdness is i386-specific.
>
> They definitely need longer commit messages and comments, but aside
> from that do these look reasonable?

I thin kthey both look reasonable, but I think we might still want to
massage things a bit (cutting down the quoting to a minimum, hopefully
leaving enough context to still make sense):

> Subject: [1/2] mmap: Skip a single VM_NONE mapping when checking the stack gap
>
>         prev = vma->vm_prev;
> +       if (prev && !(prev->vm_flags & (VM_READ | VM_WRITE | VM_EXEC)))
> +               prev = prev->vm_prev;
>         if (prev && prev->vm_end > gap_addr) {

Do we just want to ignore the user-supplied guard mapping, or do we
want to say "if the user does a guard mapping, we use that *instead*
of our stack gap"?

IOW, instead of "prev = prev->vm_prev;" and continuing, maybe we want
to just return "ok".

> Subject: [2/2] mmap: Avoid mapping anywhere within the full stack extent  if finite

This is good thinking, but no, I don't think the "if finite" is right.

I've seen people use "really big values" as replacement for
RLIM_INIFITY, for various reasons.

We've had huge confusion about RLIM_INFINITY over the years - look for
things like COMPAT_RLIM_OLD_INFINITY to see the kinds of confusions
we've had.

Some people just use MAX_LONG etc, which is *not* the same as
RLIM_INFINITY, but in practice ends up doing the same thing. Yadda
yadda.

So I'm personally leery of checking and depending on "exactly
RLIM_INIFITY", because I've seen it go wrong so many times.

And I think your second patch breaks that "use a really large value to
approximate infinity" case that definitely has existed as a pattern.

              Linus