Re: [PATCH] mm/mincore: allow for making sys_mincore() privileged

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, Jan 7, 2019 at 8:43 PM Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> So, I read the paper and before I was half way through it I figured
> there are a bunch of other similar page cache invalidation attacks
> we can perform without needing mincore. i.e. Focussing on mmap() and
> mincore() misses the wider issues we have with global shared caches.

Oh, agreed, and that was discussed in the original report too.

The thing is, you can also depend on our pre-faulting of pages in the
page fault handler, and use that to get the cached status of nearby
pages. So do something like "fault one page, then do mincore() to see
how many pages near it were mapped". See our "do_fault_around()"
logic.

But mincore is certainly the easiest interface, and the one that
doesn't require much effort or setup. It's also the one where our old
behavior was actually arguably simply stupid and actively wrong (ie
"in caches" isn't even strictly speaking a valid question, since the
caches in question may be invalid). So let's try to see if giving
mincore() slightly more well-defined semantics actually causes any
pain.

I do think that the RWF_NOWAIT case might also be interesting to look at.

                 Linus