Re: [PATCH 3/3] arm64/sve: KVM: Avoid dereference of dead task during guest entry

[Dave Martin <Dave.Martin@arm.com>]

On Mon, Dec 04, 2017 at 01:53:21PM +0000, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> On 1 December 2017 at 15:19, Dave Martin <Dave.Martin@arm.com> wrote:
> > When deciding whether to invalidate FPSIMD state cached in the cpu,
> > the backend function sve_flush_cpu_state() attempts to dereference
> > __this_cpu_read(fpsimd_last_state).  However, this is not safe:
> > there is no guarantee that the pointer is still valid, because the
> > task could have exited in the meantime.  For this reason, this
> > percpu pointer should only be assigned or compared, never
> > dereferenced.
> >
> 
> Doesn't that mean the pointer could also be pointing to the
> fpsimd_state of a newly created task that is completely unrelated?
> IOW, are you sure comparison is safe?

There are more conditions: the only place the determination is
made is for next, in fpsimd_thread_switch(next).


However, I can see your concern and I'm not sure how/if it is
resolved.

For the worst case, let's assume that some child forks off but
doesn't enter userspace yet, while another task round-robins
across all CPUs, interspersed with tasks that don't enter userspace.

So, we end up with

All cpu < NR_CPUS . per_cpu(fpsimd_last_state, cpu) == T.

Now, if T dies and a new task is allocated the same task_struct pointer,
then the _new_ T is guaranteed to get scheduled in on a CPU whose
per_cpu(fpsmid_last_state) == T.

Thus, new T can pick up old T's regs _unless_ new T's fpsimd_state.cpu
is invalid (i.e., NR_CPUS).

This is a separate bug from the one addressed by this patch though.
We can't go and harvest the bad pointers when old T exits, because
this might race new T being scheduled for real -- in any case it
would involve iterating over all CPUs which sounds racy and
inefficient.


So, I'd say we _must_ call fpsimd_flush_task_state() for every new
task.  This may result in a redundant reload of the state, but this
is what would happen anyway if the pointers did not alias.

Does this sound real to you?  If so, I'll try to write something.

And does this patch look reasonable to fix what it's trying to fix?


I wonder whether arch/arm has the same bug actually, since the kernel-
mode NEON logic was modelled from there IIUC (?)

Cheers
---Dave