Re: [PATCH v4 2/3] mm: introduce put_user_page*(), placeholder versions

[John Hubbard]

On 10/11/18 6:23 PM, John Hubbard wrote:
> On 10/11/18 6:20 AM, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 10:49:29AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
>>
>>>> This is a real worry.  If someone uses a mistaken put_page() then how
>>>> will that bug manifest at runtime?  Under what set of circumstances
>>>> will the kernel trigger the bug?
>>>
>>> At runtime such bug will manifest as a page that can never be evicted from
>>> memory. We could warn in put_page() if page reference count drops below
>>> bare minimum for given user pin count which would be able to catch some
>>> issues but it won't be 100% reliable. So at this point I'm more leaning
>>> towards making get_user_pages() return a different type than just
>>> struct page * to make it much harder for refcount to go wrong...
>>
>> At least for the infiniband code being used as an example here we take
>> the struct page from get_user_pages, then stick it in a sgl, and at
>> put_page time we get the page back out of the sgl via sg_page()
>>
>> So type safety will not help this case... I wonder how many other
>> users are similar? I think this is a pretty reasonable flow for DMA
>> with user pages.
>>
> 
> That is true. The infiniband code, fortunately, never mixes the two page
> types into the same pool (or sg list), so it's actually an easier example
> than some other subsystems. But, yes, type safety doesn't help there. I can 
> take a moment to look around at the other areas, to quantify how much a type
> safety change might help.
> 
> Back to page flags again, out of desperation:
> 
> How much do we know about the page types that all of these subsystems
> use? In other words, can we, for example, use bit 1 of page->lru.next (see [1]
> for context) as the "dma-pinned" page flag, while tracking pages within parts 
> of the kernel that call a mix of alloc_pages, get_user_pages, and other allocators? 
> In order for that to work, page->index, page->private, and bit 1 of page->mapping
> must not be used. I doubt that this is always going to hold, but...does it?
> 

Oops, pardon me, please ignore that nonsense about page->index and page->private
and page->mapping, that's actually fine (I was seeing "union", where "struct" was
written--too much staring at this code). 

So actually, I think maybe we can just use bit 1 in page->lru.next to sort out
which pages are dma-pinned, in the calling code, just like we're going to do
in writeback situations. This should also allow run-time checking that Andrew was 
hoping for:

    put_user_page(): assert that the page is dma-pinned
    put_page(): assert that the page is *not* dma-pinned

...both of which depend on that bit being, essentially, available as sort of a
general page flag. And in fact, if it's not, then the whole approach is dead anyway.

Am I missing anything? This avoids the need to change the get_user_pages interface.


thanks,
-- 
John Hubbard
NVIDIA