Re: [PATCH v8 00/17] gfs2: Fix mmap + page fault deadlocks

[Catalin Marinas]

One last try on this path before I switch to the other options.

On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 02:14:48PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 12:13 PM Catalin Marinas
> <catalin.marinas@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > As an alternative, you mentioned earlier that a per-thread fault status
> > was not feasible on x86 due to races. Was this only for the hw poison
> > case? I think the uaccess is slightly different.
> 
> It's not x86-specific, it's very generic.
> 
> If we set some flag in the per-thread status, we'll need to be careful
> about not overwriting it if we then have a subsequent NMI that _also_
> takes a (completely unrelated) page fault - before we then read the
> per-thread flag.
> 
> Think 'perf' and fetching backtraces etc.
> 
> Note that the NMI page fault can easily also be a pointer coloring
> fault on arm64, for exactly the same reason that whatever original
> copy_from_user() code was. So this is not a "oh, pointer coloring
> faults are different". They have the same re-entrancy issue.
> 
> And both the "pagefault_disable" and "fault happens in interrupt
> context" cases are also the exact same 'faulthandler_disabled()'
> thing. So even at fault time they look very similar.

They do look fairly similar but we should have the information in the
fault handler to distinguish: not a page fault (pte permission or p*d
translation), in_task(), user address, fixup handler. But I agree the
logic looks fragile.

I think for nested contexts we can save the uaccess fault state on
exception entry, restore it on return. Or (needs some thinking on
atomicity) save it in a local variable. The high-level API would look
something like:

	unsigned long uaccess_flags;	/* we could use TIF_ flags */

	uaccess_flags = begin_retriable_uaccess();
	copied = copy_page_from_iter_atomic(...);
	retry = end_retriable_uaccess(uaccess_flags);
	...

	if (!retry)
		break;

I think we'd need a TIF flag to mark the retriable region and another to
track whether a non-recoverable fault occurred. It needs prototyping.

Anyway, if you don't like this approach, I'll look at error codes being
returned but rather than changing all copy_from_user() etc., introduce a
new API that returns different error codes depending on the fault
(e.g -EFAULT vs -EACCES). We already have copy_from_user_nofault(), we'd
need something for the iov_iter stuff to use in the fs code.

-- 
Catalin