Re: [PATCH v5 07/27] mm/mmap: Create a guard area between VMAs

Yu-cheng Yu
2018-10-11T20:49:00Z

On Thu, 2018-10-11 at 22:39 +0200, Jann Horn wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 5:20 PM Yu-cheng Yu <yu-cheng.yu@intel.com> wrote:
> > Create a guard area between VMAs to detect memory corruption.
>
> [...]
> > +config VM_AREA_GUARD
> > + bool "VM area guard"
> > + default n
> > + help
> > + Create a guard area between VM areas so that access beyond
> > + limit can be detected.
> > +
> > endmenu
>
> Sorry to bring this up so late, but Daniel Micay pointed out to me
> that, given that VMA guards will raise the number of VMAs by
> inhibiting vma_merge(), people are more likely to run into
> /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count (which limits the number of VMAs to ~65k by
> default, and can't easily be raised without risking an overflow of
> page->_mapcount on systems with over ~800GiB of RAM, see
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20180208021112.GB14918@bombadil.infradead.org/
> and replies) with this change.

Can we use the VMA guard only for Shadow Stacks?

Yu-cheng