linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 0/1] mm: restore full accuracy in COW page reuse

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Date:   Mon, 11 Jan 2021 12:42:20 +0000
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
To:     John Hubbard <jhubbard@...dia.com>
Cc:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Yu Zhao <yuzhao@...gle.com>, Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>,
        Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com>,
        Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@...nvz.org>,
        Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@...cle.com>,
        Mike Rapoport <rppt@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>,
        Will Deacon <will@...nel.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>,
        "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@...temov.name>,
        Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>, Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
        Leon Romanovsky <leonro@...dia.com>,
        Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@...pe.ca>, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>,
        Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@...tuozzo.com>,
        Nadav Amit <nadav.amit@...il.com>, Jens Axboe <axboe@...nel.dk>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/1] mm: restore full accuracy in COW page reuse

On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 11:26:57PM -0800, John Hubbard wrote:
> IMHO, a lot of the bits in page _refcount are still being wasted (even
> after GUP_PIN_COUNTING_BIAS overloading), because it's unlikely that
> there are many callers of gup/pup per page. If anyone points out that
> that is wrong, then the rest of this falls apart, but...if we were to
> make a rule that "only a very few FOLL_GET or FOLL_PIN pins are ever
> simultaneously allowed on a given page", then several things become
> possible:

There's "the normal case" and then there's "the attacker case" where
someone's deliberately trying to wrap page->_refcount.  There are lots of
interesting games people can play with an anon page, like stuffing it into
(lots of) pipes, forking lots of children, starting lots of O_DIRECT I/O
against it to a FUSE filesystem that's deliberately engineered to be slow.

We have some protection against that, but I'm not 100% sure it's working,
and making it easier to increase refcount in large chunks makes it more
likely that we would defeat that protection.