Sleeping in user_access section
From: Julien Thierry
Date: Fri Nov 23 2018 - 04:27:23 EST
Hi,
I made an attempt at implementing the
user_access_begin()/user_access_end() macros along with the
get/put_user_unsafe() for arm64 by toggling the status of PAN (more or
less similar to x86's STAC/CTAC).
With a small mistake in my patch, we realized that directly calling
function that could reschedule while in a user_access section could lead to:
- scheduling another task keeping the user_access status enabled despite
the task never calling user_access_begin()
- when re-scheduling the task that was mid user_access section,
user_access would be disabled and the task would fault on the next
get/put_user_unsafe.
This is because __switch_to does not alter the user_access status when
switching from next to prev (at least on arm64 we currently don't, and
by looking at the x86 code I don't think this is done either).
From my understanding, this is not an issue when the task in
user_access mode gets scheduled out/in as a result of an interrupt as
PAN and EFLAGS.AC get saved/restore on exception entry/exit (at least I
know it is the case for PAN, I am less sure for the x86 side).
So, the question is, should __switch_to take care of the user_access
status when scheduling new tasks? Or should there be a restriction about
scheduling out a task with user_access mode enabled and maybe add a
warning if we can detect this?
(Or did we miss something and this is not an issue on x86?)
Thanks,
--
Julien Thierry