netdev - Re: [PATCH V2 7/9] vhost: do not use RCU to synchronize MMU notifier with worker

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Date:   Mon, 5 Aug 2019 16:21:48 +0800
From:   Jason Wang <jasowang@...hat.com>
To:     "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>
Cc:     Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@...pe.ca>, kvm@...r.kernel.org,
        virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH V2 7/9] vhost: do not use RCU to synchronize MMU notifier
 with worker


On 2019/8/5 下午2:28, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 05, 2019 at 12:33:45PM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
>> On 2019/8/2 下午10:03, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>>> On Fri, Aug 02, 2019 at 05:40:07PM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
>>>> Btw, I come up another idea, that is to disable preemption when vhost thread
>>>> need to access the memory. Then register preempt notifier and if vhost
>>>> thread is preempted, we're sure no one will access the memory and can do the
>>>> cleanup.
>>> Great, more notifiers :(
>>>
>>> Maybe can live with
>>> 1- disable preemption while using the cached pointer
>>> 2- teach vhost to recover from memory access failures,
>>>      by switching to regular from/to user path
>>
>> I don't get this, I believe we want to recover from regular from/to user
>> path, isn't it?
> That (disable copy to/from user completely) would be a nice to have
> since it would reduce the attack surface of the driver, but e.g. your
> code already doesn't do that.
>

Yes since it requires a lot of changes.


>
>>> So if you want to try that, fine since it's a step in
>>> the right direction.
>>>
>>> But I think fundamentally it's not what we want to do long term.
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>>
>>> It's always been a fundamental problem with this patch series that only
>>> metadata is accessed through a direct pointer.
>>>
>>> The difference in ways you handle metadata and data is what is
>>> now coming and messing everything up.
>>
>> I do propose soemthing like this in the past:
>> https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-virtualization/msg36824.html. But looks
>> like you have some concern about its locality.
> Right and it doesn't go away. You'll need to come up
> with a test that messes it up and triggers a worst-case
> scenario, so we can measure how bad is that worst-case.




>
>> But the problem still there, GUP can do page fault, so still need to
>> synchronize it with MMU notifiers.
> I think the idea was, if GUP would need a pagefault, don't
> do a GUP and do to/from user instead.


But this still need to be synchronized with MMU notifiers (or using 
dedicated work for GUP).


>   Hopefully that
> will fault the page in and the next access will go through.
>
>> The solution might be something like
>> moving GUP to a dedicated kind of vhost work.
> Right, generally GUP.
>
>>> So if continuing the direct map approach,
>>> what is needed is a cache of mapped VM memory, then on a cache miss
>>> we'd queue work along the lines of 1-2 above.
>>>
>>> That's one direction to take. Another one is to give up on that and
>>> write our own version of uaccess macros.  Add a "high security" flag to
>>> the vhost module and if not active use these for userspace memory
>>> access.
>>
>> Or using SET_BACKEND_FEATURES?
> No, I don't think it's considered best practice to allow unpriveledged
> userspace control over whether kernel enables security features.


Get this.


>
>> But do you mean permanent GUP as I did in
>> original RFC https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/13/218?
>>
>> Thanks
> Permanent GUP breaks THP and NUMA.


Yes.

Thanks


>
>>>