Re: [PATCH 1/6] mm: enable page walking API to lock vmas during the walk

[Suren Baghdasaryan]

On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 2:34 PM Peter Xu <peterx@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Aug 01, 2023 at 01:28:56PM -0700, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
> > I have the new patchset ready but I see 3 places where we walk the
> > pages after mmap_write_lock() while *I think* we can tolerate
> > concurrent page faults (don't need to lock the vmas):
> >
> > s390_enable_sie()
> > break_ksm()
> > clear_refs_write()
>
> This one doesn't look right to be listed - tlb flushing is postponed after
> pgtable lock released, so I assume the same issue can happen like fork():
> where we can have race coditions to corrupt data if, e.g., thread A
> writting with a writable (unflushed) tlb, alongside with thread B CoWing.

Ah, good point.

>
> It'll indeed be nice to know whether break_ksm() can avoid that lock_vma
> parameter across quite a few function jumps. I don't yet see an immediate
> issue with this one..  No idea on s390_enable_sie(), but to make it simple
> and safe I'd simply leave it with the write vma lock to match the mmap
> write lock.

Thanks for taking a look, Peter!

Ok, let me keep all three of them with vma locking in place to be safe
and will post v2 for further discussion.
Thanks,
Suren.

>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Peter Xu
>