Re: [PATCH 3/3] btrfs: Avoid live-lock in search_ioctl() on hardware with sub-page faults

Linus Torvalds
2021-11-29T22:13:34Z

On Mon, Nov 29, 2021 at 12:56 PM Catalin Marinas
<catalin.marinas@arm.com> wrote:
>
> For arm64 at least __put_user() does the access_ok() check. I thought
> only unsafe_put_user() should skip the checks. If __put_user() can write
> arbitrary memory, we may have a bigger problem.

That's literally be the historical difference between __put_user() and
put_user() - the access check.

> I think that would be useful, though it doesn't solve the potential
> livelock with sub-page faults.

I was assuming we'd just do the sub-page faults.

In fact, I was assuming we'd basically just replace all the PAGE_ALIGN
and PAGE_SIZE with SUBPAGE_{ALIGN,SIZE}, together with something like

if (size > PAGE_SIZE)
size = PAGE_SIZE;

to limit that size thing (or possibly make that "min size" be a
parameter, so that people who have things like that "I need at least
this initial structure to be copied" issue can document their minimum
size needs).

Linus