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Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:36:59 +0100
From: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 10/17] prmem: documentation
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To: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>, Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>, Igor Stoppa <igor.stoppa@gmail.com>, Mimi Zohar <zohar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>, Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>, James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>, Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>, Kernel Hardening <kernel-hardening@lists.openwall.com>, linux-integrity <linux-integrity@vger.kernel.org>, linux-security-module <linux-security-module@vger.kernel.org>, Igor Stoppa <igor.stoppa@huawei.com>, Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>, Laura Abbott <labbott@redhat.com>, Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>, Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>, "open list:DOCUMENTATION" <linux-doc@vger.kernel.org>, LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
List-ID: <kernel-hardening.lists.openwall.com>

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 10:58:14AM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 10:06:51AM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > > On Oct 30, 2018, at 9:37 AM, Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> wrote:
> > I support the addition of a rare-write mechanism to the upstream kernel.
> > And I think that there is only one sane way to implement it: using an
> > mm_struct. That mm_struct, just like any sane mm_struct, should only
> > differ from init_mm in that it has extra mappings in the *user* region.
> 
> I'd like to understand this approach a little better.  In a syscall path,
> we run with the user task's mm.  What you're proposing is that when we
> want to modify rare data, we switch to rare_mm which contains a
> writable mapping to all the kernel data which is rare-write.
> 
> So the API might look something like this:
> 
> 	void *p = rare_alloc(...);	/* writable pointer */
> 	p->a = x;
> 	q = rare_protect(p);		/* read-only pointer */
> 
> To subsequently modify q,
> 
> 	p = rare_modify(q);
> 	q->a = y;
> 	rare_protect(p);

Why would you have rare_alloc() imply rare_modify() ? Would you have the
allocator meta data inside the rare section?