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

Andreas Gruenbacher
2021-11-29T13:36:02Z

On Mon, Nov 29, 2021 at 1:22 PM Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 27, 2021 at 07:05:39PM +0100, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 27, 2021 at 4:21 PM Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com> wrote:
> > > That's similar, somehow, to the arch-specific probing in one of my
> > > patches: [1]. We could do the above if we can guarantee that the maximum
> > > error margin in copy_to_user() is smaller than SUBPAGE_FAULT_SIZE. For
> > > arm64 copy_to_user(), it is fine, but for copy_from_user(), if we ever
> > > need to handle fault_in_readable(), it isn't (on arm64 up to 64 bytes
> > > even if aligned: reads of large blocks are done in 4 * 16 loads, and if
> > > one of them fails e.g. because of the 16-byte sub-page fault, no write
> > > is done, hence such larger than 16 delta).
> > >
> > > If you want something in the generic fault_in_writeable(), we probably
> > > need a loop over UACCESS_MAX_WRITE_ERROR in SUBPAGE_FAULT_SIZE
> > > increments. But I thought I'd rather keep this in the arch-specific code.
> >
> > I see, that's even crazier than I'd thought. The looping / probing is
> > still pretty generic, so I'd still consider putting it in the generic
> > code.
>
> In the arm64 probe_subpage_user_writeable(), the loop is skipped if
> !system_supports_mte() (static label). It doesn't make much difference
> for search_ioctl() in terms of performance but I'd like the arch code to
> dynamically decide when to probe. An arch_has_subpage_faults() static
> inline function would solve this.
>
> However, the above assumes that the only way of probing is by doing a
> get_user/put_user(). A non-destructive probe with MTE would be to read
> the actual tags in memory and compare them with the top byte of the
> pointer.
>
> There's the CHERI architecture as well. Although very early days for
> arm64, we do have an incipient port (https://www.morello-project.org/).
> The void __user * pointers are propagated inside the kernel as 128-bit
> capabilities. A fault_in() would check whether the address (bottom
> 64-bit) is within the range and permissions specified in the upper
> 64-bit of the capability. There is no notion of sub-page fault
> granularity here and no need to do a put_user() as the check is just
> done on the pointer/capability.
>
> Given the above, my preference is to keep the probing arch-specific.
>
> > We also still have fault_in_safe_writeable which is more difficult to
> > fix, and fault_in_readable which we don't want to leave behind broken,
> > either.
>
> fault_in_safe_writeable() can be done by using get_user() instead of
> put_user() for arm64 MTE and probably SPARC ADI (an alternative is to
> read the in-memory tags and compare them with the pointer).

So we'd keep the existing fault_in_safe_writeable() logic for the
actual fault-in and use get_user() to check for sub-page faults? If
so, then that should probably also be hidden in arch code.

> For CHERI, that's different again since the fault_in_safe_writeable capability
> encodes the read/write permissions independently.
>
> However, do we actually want to change the fault_in_safe_writeable() and
> fault_in_readable() functions at this stage? I could not get any of them
> to live-lock, though I only tried btrfs, ext4 and gfs2. As per the
> earlier discussion, normal files accesses are guaranteed to make
> progress. The only problematic one was O_DIRECT which seems to be
> alright for the above filesystems (the fs either bails out after several
> attempts or uses GUP to read which skips the uaccess altogether).

Only gfs2 uses fault_in_safe_writeable(). For buffered reads, progress
is guaranteed because failures are at a byte granularity.

O_DIRECT reads and writes happen in device block size granularity, but
the pages are grabbed with get_user_pages() before the copying
happens. So by the time the copying happens, the pages are guaranteed
to be resident, and we don't need to loop around fault_in_*().

You've mentioned before that copying to/from struct page bypasses
sub-page fault checking. If that is the case, then the checking
probably needs to happen in iomap_dio_bio_iter and dio_refill_pages
instead.

> Happy to address them if there is a real concern, I just couldn't trigger it.

Hopefully it should now be clear why you couldn't. One way of
reproducing with fault_in_safe_writeable() would be to use that in
btrfs instead of fault_in_writeable(), of course.

We're not doing any chunked reads from user space with page faults
disabled as far as I'm aware right now, so we probably don't have a
reproducer for fault_in_readable(). It would still be worth fixing
fault_in_readable() to prevent things from blowing up very
unexpectedly later, though.

Thanks,
Andreas

> > > Of course, the above fault_in_writeable() still needs the btrfs
> > > search_ioctl() counterpart toget_user_pages change the probing on the actual fault
> > > address or offset.
> >
> > Yes, but that change is relatively simple and it eliminates the need
> > for probing the entire buffer, so it's a good thing. Maybe you want to
> > add this though:
> >
> > --- a/fs/btrfs/ioctl.c
> > +++ b/fs/btrfs/ioctl.c
> > @@ -2202,3 +2202,3 @@ static noinline int search_ioctl(struct inode *inode,
> > unsigned long sk_offset = 0;
> > - char __user *fault_in_addr;
> > + char __user *fault_in_addr, *end;
> >
> > @@ -2230,6 +2230,6 @@ static noinline int search_ioctl(struct inode *inode,
> > fault_in_addr = ubuf;
> > + end = ubuf + *buf_size;
> > while (1) {
> > ret = -EFAULT;
> > - if (fault_in_writeable(fault_in_addr,
> > - *buf_size - (fault_in_addr - ubuf)))
> > + if (fault_in_writeable(fault_in_addr, end - fault_in_addr))
> > break;
>
> Thanks, I'll add it.
>
> --
> Catalin
>