Re: [PATCH 10/17] prmem: documentation

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 10:58:14AM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 10:06:51AM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > > On Oct 30, 2018, at 9:37 AM, Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I support the addition of a rare-write mechanism to the upstream kernel.
> > And I think that there is only one sane way to implement it: using an
> > mm_struct. That mm_struct, just like any sane mm_struct, should only
> > differ from init_mm in that it has extra mappings in the *user* region.
> 
> I'd like to understand this approach a little better.  In a syscall path,
> we run with the user task's mm.  What you're proposing is that when we
> want to modify rare data, we switch to rare_mm which contains a
> writable mapping to all the kernel data which is rare-write.
> 
> So the API might look something like this:
> 
> 	void *p = rare_alloc(...);	/* writable pointer */
> 	p->a = x;
> 	q = rare_protect(p);		/* read-only pointer */
> 
> To subsequently modify q,
> 
> 	p = rare_modify(q);
> 	q->a = y;
> 	rare_protect(p);

Why would you have rare_alloc() imply rare_modify() ? Would you have the
allocator meta data inside the rare section?