linux-kernel - Re: [RFC] Warn the user when they could overflow mapcount

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Message-ID: <24367.1518112722@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
Date:   Thu, 08 Feb 2018 12:58:42 -0500
From:   valdis.kletnieks@...edu
To:     Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com>
Cc:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        Kernel Hardening <kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com>,
        kernel list <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@...ux.intel.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] Warn the user when they could overflow mapcount

On Thu, 08 Feb 2018 03:56:26 +0100, Jann Horn said:

> I wouldn't be too surprised if there are more 32-bit overflows that
> start being realistic once you put something on the order of terabytes
> of memory into one machine, given that refcount_t is 32 bits wide -
> for example, the i_count. See
> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=809 for an
> example where, given a sufficiently high RLIMIT_MEMLOCK, it was
> possible to overflow a 32-bit refcounter on a system with just ~32GiB
> of free memory (minimum required to store 2^32 64-bit pointers).
>
> On systems with RAM on the order of terabytes, it's probably a good
> idea to turn on refcount hardening to make issues like that
> non-exploitable for now.

I have at least 10 systems across the hall that have 3T of RAM on them
across our various HPC clusters.  So this is indeed no longer a hypothetical
issue.

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