Re: [PATCH v4 01/26] mm/mmu_notifiers: pass private data down to alloc_notifier()

Jean-Philippe Brucker
2020-03-06T16:15:32Z

On Fri, Mar 06, 2020 at 10:52:45AM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 06, 2020 at 03:35:56PM +0100, Jean-Philippe Brucker wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 06, 2020 at 09:09:19AM -0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > On Fri, Mar 06, 2020 at 10:56:14AM +0100, Jean-Philippe Brucker wrote:
> > > > I tried to keep it simple like that: normally mmu_notifier_get() is called
> > > > in bind(), and mmu_notifier_put() is called in unbind().
> > > >
> > > > Multiple device drivers may call bind() with the same mm. Each bind()
> > > > calls mmu_notifier_get(), obtains the same io_mm, and returns a new bond
> > > > (a device<->mm link). Each bond is freed by calling unbind(), which calls
> > > > mmu_notifier_put().
> > > >
> > > > That's the most common case. Now if the process is killed and the mm
> > > > disappears, we do need to avoid use-after-free caused by DMA of the
> > > > mappings and the page tables.
> > >
> > > This is why release must do invalidate all - but it doesn't need to do
> > > any more - as no SPTE can be established without a mmget() - and
> > > mmget() is no longer possible past release.
> >
> > In our case we don't have SPTEs, the whole pgd is shared between MMU and
> > IOMMU (isolated using PASID tables).
>
> Okay, but this just means that 'invalidate all' also requires
> switching the PASID to use some pgd that is permanently 'all fail'.
>
> > At this point no one told the device to stop working on this queue,
> > it may still be doing DMA on this address space.
>
> Sure, but there are lots of cases where a defective user space can
> cause pages under active DMA to disappear, like munmap for
> instance. Process exit is really no different, the PASID should take
> errors and the device & driver should do whatever error flow it has.

We do have the possibility to shut things down in order, so to me this
feels like a band-aid. The idea has come up before though [1], and I'm not
strongly opposed to this model, but I'm still not convinced it's
necessary. It does add more complexity to IOMMU drivers, to avoid printing
out the errors that we wouldn't otherwise see, whereas device drivers need
in any case to implement the logic that forces stop DMA.

Thanks,
Jean

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-iommu/4d68da96-0ad5-b412-5987-2f7a6aa796c3@amd.com/

>
> Involving a complex driver flow in the exit_mmap path seems like
> dangerous complexity to me.
>
> Jason