Re: [PATCH 10/17] prmem: documentation

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 10:36:59AM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> 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?

Normally when I allocate some memory I need to initialise it before
doing anything else with it ;-)

I mean, you could do:

	ro = rare_alloc(..);
	rare = rare_modify(ro);
	rare->a = x;
	rare_protect(rare);

but that's more typing.