Re: [PATCH RFC] iommu/dma: Validate page before accessing P2PDMA state

From: Ashish Mhetre

Date: Fri Feb 27 2026 - 00:46:28 EST




On 2/26/2026 1:28 PM, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
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On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 08:11:29PM +0000, Pranjal Shrivastava wrote:
On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 09:56:09AM +0200, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 10:19:41AM +0530, Ashish Mhetre wrote:

On 2/25/2026 2:27 AM, Pranjal Shrivastava wrote:
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On Tue, Feb 24, 2026 at 02:32:21PM +0200, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
On Tue, Feb 24, 2026 at 10:42:57AM +0000, Ashish Mhetre wrote:
When mapping scatter-gather entries that reference reserved
memory regions without struct page backing (e.g., bootloader created
carveouts), is_pci_p2pdma_page() dereferences the page pointer
returned by sg_page() without first verifying its validity.
I believe this behavior started after commit 88df6ab2f34b
("mm: add folio_is_pci_p2pdma()"). Prior to that change, the
is_zone_device_page(page) check would return false when given a
non‑existent page pointer.

Thanks Leon for the review. This crash started after commit 30280eee2db1
("iommu/dma: support PCI P2PDMA pages in dma-iommu map_sg").

Doesn't folio_is_pci_p2pdma() also check for zone device?
I see[1] that it does:

static inline bool folio_is_pci_p2pdma(const struct folio *folio)
{
return IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_PCI_P2PDMA) &&
folio_is_zone_device(folio) &&
folio->pgmap->type == MEMORY_DEVICE_PCI_P2PDMA;
}

I believe the problem arises due to the page_folio() call in
folio_is_pci_p2pdma(page_folio(page)); within is_pci_p2pdma_page().
page_folio() assumes it has a valid struct page to work with. For these
carveouts, that isn't true.

Potentially something like the following would stop the crash:

diff --git a/include/linux/memremap.h b/include/linux/memremap.h
index e3c2ccf872a8..e47876021afa 100644
--- a/include/linux/memremap.h
+++ b/include/linux/memremap.h
@@ -197,7 +197,8 @@ static inline void folio_set_zone_device_data(struct folio *folio, void *data)

static inline bool is_pci_p2pdma_page(const struct page *page)
{
- return IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_PCI_P2PDMA) &&
+ return IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_PCI_P2PDMA) && page &&
+ pfn_valid(page_to_pfn(page)) &&
folio_is_pci_p2pdma(page_folio(page));
}

Yes, this will also fix the crash.

But my broader question is: why are we calling a page-based API like
is_pci_p2pdma_page() on non-struct-page memory in the first place?
Could we instead add a helper to verify if the sg_page() return value
is actually backed by a struct page? If it isn't, we should arguably
skip the P2PDMA logic entirely and fall back to a dma_map_phys style
path. Isn't handling these "pageless" physical ranges the primary reason
dma_map_phys exists?
Thanks for the feedback, Pranjal.

To clarify: are you suggesting we handle non-page-backed mappings inside
iommu_dma_map_sg (within dma-iommu), or that callers should detect
non-page-backed memory and use dma_map_phys instead of dma_map_sg?
The latter one.

Yup, I meant the latter.

Former approach sounds better so that existing iommu_dma_map_sg callers
don't need changes, but I'd like to confirm your preference.
The bug is in callers which used wrong API, they need to be adapted.
Yes, the thing is, if the caller already knows that the region to be
mapped is NOT struct page-backed, then why does it use dma_map_sg
variants?
Before dma_map_phys() was added, there was no reliable way to DMA‑map
such memory, and using dma_map_sg() was a workaround that happened to
work. I'm not sure whether it worked by design or by accident, but the
correct approach now is to use dma_map_phys().

Thanks Leon and Pranjal for the detailed feedback. I'll update our callers to use
dma_map_phys() for non-page-backed buffers.

One question: would it make sense to add a check in iommu_dma_map_sg to
fail gracefully when non-page-backed buffers are passed, instead of crashing
the kernel?

Thanks,
Ashish Mhetre

Thanks

Thanks
Praan