Re: [PATCH 0/3] userfaultfd: allow to forbid unprivileged users

Mike Kravetz
2019-03-13T17:50:48Z

On 3/12/19 11:00 PM, Peter Xu wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 12:59:34PM -0700, Mike Kravetz wrote:
>> On 3/11/19 2:36 AM, Peter Xu wrote:
>>>
>>> The "kvm" entry is a bit special here only to make sure that existing
>>> users like QEMU/KVM won't break by this newly introduced flag. What
>>> we need to do is simply set the "unprivileged_userfaultfd" flag to
>>> "kvm" here to automatically grant userfaultfd permission for processes
>>> like QEMU/KVM without extra code to tweak these flags in the admin
>>> code.
>>
>> Another user is Oracle DB, specifically with hugetlbfs. For them, we would
>> like to add a special case like kvm described above. The admin controls
>> who can have access to hugetlbfs, so I think adding code to the open
>> routine as in patch 2 of this series would seem to work.
>
> Yes I think if there's an explicit and safe place we can hook for
> hugetlbfs then we can do the similar trick as KVM case. Though I
> noticed that we can not only create hugetlbfs files under the
> mountpoint (which the admin can control), but also using some other
> ways. The question (of me... sorry if it's a silly one!) is whether
> all other ways to use hugetlbfs is still under control of the admin.
> One I know of is memfd_create() which seems to be doable even as
> unprivileged users. If so, should we only limit the uffd privilege to
> those hugetlbfs users who use the mountpoint directly?

Wow! I did not realize that apps which specify mmap(MAP_HUGETLB) do not
need any special privilege to use huge pages. Honestly, I am not sure if
that was by design or a bug. The memfd_create code is based on the MAP_HUGETLB
code and also does not need any special privilege. Not to sidetrack this
discussion, but people on Cc may know if this is a bug or by design. My
opinion is that huge pages are a limited resource and should be under control.
One needs to be a member of a special group (or root) to access via System V
interfaces.

The DB use case only does mmap of files in an explicitly mounted filesystem.
So, limiting it in that manner would work for them.

> Another question is about fork() of privileged processes - for KVM we
> only grant privilege for the exact process that opened the /dev/kvm
> node, and the privilege will be lost for any forked childrens. Is
> that the same thing for OracleDB/Hugetlbfs?

I need to confirm with the DB people, but it is my understanding that the
exact process which does the open/mmap will be the one using userfaultfd.
--
Mike Kravetz