Message-Id: <20220601210951.3916598-5-axelrasmussen@google.com>
Date:   Wed,  1 Jun 2022 14:09:49 -0700
From:   Axel Rasmussen <axelrasmussen@...gle.com>
To:     Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Charan Teja Reddy <charante@...eaurora.org>,
        Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...ux.intel.com>,
        "Dmitry V . Levin" <ldv@...linux.org>,
        Gleb Fotengauer-Malinovskiy <glebfm@...linux.org>,
        Hugh Dickins <hughd@...gle.com>, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        Mel Gorman <mgorman@...hsingularity.net>,
        Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@...cle.com>,
        Mike Rapoport <rppt@...nel.org>, Nadav Amit <namit@...are.com>,
        Peter Xu <peterx@...hat.com>, Shuah Khan <shuah@...nel.org>,
        Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@...gle.com>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>, zhangyi <yi.zhang@...wei.com>
Cc:     Axel Rasmussen <axelrasmussen@...gle.com>,
        linux-doc@...r.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-kselftest@...r.kernel.org
Subject: [PATCH v3 4/6] userfaultfd: update documentation to describe /dev/userfaultfd

Explain the different ways to create a new userfaultfd, and how access
control works for each way.

Signed-off-by: Axel Rasmussen <axelrasmussen@...gle.com>
---
 Documentation/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.rst | 40 ++++++++++++++++++--
 Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst      |  3 ++
 2 files changed, 40 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.rst
index 6528036093e1..9bae1acd431f 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.rst
@@ -17,7 +17,10 @@ of the ``PROT_NONE+SIGSEGV`` trick.
 Design
 ======
 
-Userfaults are delivered and resolved through the ``userfaultfd`` syscall.
+Userspace creates a new userfaultfd, initializes it, and registers one or more
+regions of virtual memory with it. Then, any page faults which occur within the
+region(s) result in a message being delivered to the userfaultfd, notifying
+userspace of the fault.
 
 The ``userfaultfd`` (aside from registering and unregistering virtual
 memory ranges) provides two primary functionalities:
@@ -34,12 +37,11 @@ The real advantage of userfaults if compared to regular virtual memory
 management of mremap/mprotect is that the userfaults in all their
 operations never involve heavyweight structures like vmas (in fact the
 ``userfaultfd`` runtime load never takes the mmap_lock for writing).
-
 Vmas are not suitable for page- (or hugepage) granular fault tracking
 when dealing with virtual address spaces that could span
 Terabytes. Too many vmas would be needed for that.
 
-The ``userfaultfd`` once opened by invoking the syscall, can also be
+The ``userfaultfd``, once created, can also be
 passed using unix domain sockets to a manager process, so the same
 manager process could handle the userfaults of a multitude of
 different processes without them being aware about what is going on
@@ -50,6 +52,38 @@ is a corner case that would currently return ``-EBUSY``).
 API
 ===
 
+Creating a userfaultfd
+----------------------
+
+There are two ways to create a new userfaultfd, each of which provide ways to
+restrict access to this functionality (since historically userfaultfds which
+handle kernel page faults have been a useful tool for exploiting the kernel).
+
+The first way, supported by older kernels, is the userfaultfd(2) syscall.
+Access to this is controlled in several ways:
+
+- By default, the userfaultfd will be able to handle kernel page faults. This
+  can be disabled by passing in UFFD_USER_MODE_ONLY.
+
+- If vm.unprivileged_userfaultfd is 0, then the caller must *either* have
+  CAP_SYS_PTRACE, or pass in UFFD_USER_MODE_ONLY.
+
+- If vm.unprivileged_userfaultfd is 1, then no particular privilege is needed to
+  use this syscall, even if UFFD_USER_MODE_ONLY is *not* set.
+
+The second way, added to the kernel more recently, is by opening and issuing a
+USERFAULTFD_IOC_NEW ioctl to /dev/userfaultfd. This method yields equivalent
+userfaultfds to the userfaultfd(2) syscall; its benefit is in how access to
+creating userfaultfds is controlled.
+
+Access to /dev/userfaultfd is controlled via normal filesystem permissions
+(user/group/mode for example), which gives fine grained access to userfaultfd
+specifically, without also granting other unrelated privileges at the same time
+(as e.g. granting CAP_SYS_PTRACE would do).
+
+Initializing up a userfaultfd
+-----------------------------
+
 When first opened the ``userfaultfd`` must be enabled invoking the
 ``UFFDIO_API`` ioctl specifying a ``uffdio_api.api`` value set to ``UFFD_API`` (or
 a later API version) which will specify the ``read/POLLIN`` protocol
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst
index d7374a1e8ac9..e3a952d1fd35 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst
@@ -927,6 +927,9 @@ calls without any restrictions.
 
 The default value is 0.
 
+An alternative to this sysctl / the userfaultfd(2) syscall is to create
+userfaultfds via /dev/userfaultfd. See
+Documentation/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.rst.
 
 user_reserve_kbytes
 ===================
-- 
2.36.1.255.ge46751e96f-goog

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