Re: [PATCH v2] kvm: Faults which trigger IO release the mmap_sem

Andrea Arcangeli
2014-09-25T21:16:04Z

Hi Andres,

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 10:51:48AM -0700, Andres Lagar-Cavilla wrote:
> + if (!locked) {
> + VM_BUG_ON(npages != -EBUSY);
> +

Shouldn't this be VM_BUG_ON(npages)?

Alternatively we could patch gup to do:

case -EHWPOISON:
+ case -EBUSY:
return i ? i : ret;
- case -EBUSY:
- return i;

I need to fix gup_fast slow path to start with FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY
similarly to what you did to the KVM slow path.

gup_fast is called without the mmap_sem (incidentally its whole point
is to only disable irqs and not take the locks) so the enabling of
FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY initial pass inside gup_fast should be all self
contained. It shouldn't concern KVM which should be already fine with
your patch, but it will allow the userfaultfd to intercept all
O_DIRECT gup_fast in addition to KVM with your patch.

Eventually get_user_pages should be obsoleted in favor of
get_user_pages_locked (or whoever we decide to call it) so the
userfaultfd can intercept all kind of gups. gup_locked is same as gup
except for one more "locked" parameter at the end, I called the
parameter locked instead of nonblocking because it'd be more proper to
call "nonblocking" gup the FOLL_NOWAIT kind which is quite the
opposite (in fact as the mmap_sem cannot be dropped in the non
blocking version).

ptrace ironically is better off sticking with a NULL locked parameter
and to get a sigbus instead of risking hanging on the userfaultfd
(which would be safe as it can be killed, but it'd be annoying if
erroneously poking into a hole during a gdb session). It's still
possible to pass NULL as parameter to get_user_pages_locked to achieve
that. So the fact some callers won't block in handle_userfault because
FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY is not set and the userfault cannot block, may
come handy.

What I'm trying to solve in this context is that the userfault cannot
safely block without FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY because we can't allow
userland to take the mmap_sem for an unlimited amount of time without
requiring special privileges, so if handle_userfault wants to blocks
within a gup invocation, it must first release the mmap_sem hence
FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY is always required at the first attempt for any
virtual address.

With regard to the last sentence, there's actually a race with
MADV_DONTNEED too, I'd need to change the code to always pass
FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_RETRY (your code also would need to loop and
insisting with the __get_user_pages(locked) version to solve it). The
KVM ioctl worst case would get an -EFAULT if the race materializes for
example. It's non concerning though because that can be solved in
userland somehow by separating ballooning and live migration
activities.

Thanks,
Andrea