From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Hildenbrand Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2022 18:53:57 +0000 Subject: Re: [PATCH mm-unstable v1 20/20] mm: rename FOLL_FORCE to FOLL_PTRACE Message-Id: List-Id: References: <20221116102659.70287-1-david@redhat.com> <20221116102659.70287-21-david@redhat.com> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Linus Torvalds Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, x86@kernel.org, linux-alpha@vger.kernel.org, linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org, linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org, linux-mips@vger.kernel.org, linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org, sparclinux@vger.kernel.org, linux-um@lists.infradead.org, etnaviv@lists.freedesktop.org, dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org, linux-samsung-soc@vger.kernel.org, linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org, linux-media@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-perf-users@vger.kernel.org, linux-security-module@vger.kernel.org, linux-kselftest@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton , Jason Gunthorpe , John Hubbard , Peter Xu , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Andrea Arcangeli , Hugh Dickins , Nadav Amit , Vlastimil Babka , Matthew Wilcox , Mike Kravetz , Muchun Song , Shuah Khan , Lucas Stach , David Airlie , Oded Gabbay , Arnd Bergmann , Christoph Hellwig , Alex Williamson , Oleg Nesterov , Richard Henderson , Ivan Kokshaysky , Matt Turner , Catalin Marinas , Will Deacon , Thomas Bogendoerfer , Michael Ellerman , Nicholas Piggin , Christophe Leroy , "David S. Miller" , Thomas Gleixner , Ingo Molnar , Borislav Petkov , Dave Hansen , "H. Peter Anvin" , Richard Weinberger , Anton Ivanov , Johannes Berg , Eric Biederman , Kees Cook , Alexander Viro , Peter Zijlstra , Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo , Mark Rutland , Alexander Shishkin , Jiri Olsa , Namhyung Kim , Kentaro Takeda , Tetsuo Handa , Paul Moore , James Morris , "Serge E. Hallyn" On 16.11.22 19:16, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Wed, Nov 16, 2022 at 2:30 AM David Hildenbrand wrote: >> >> Let's make it clearer that functionality provided by FOLL_FORCE is >> really only for ptrace access. > > I'm not super-happy about this one. > > I do understand the "let's rename the bit so that no new user shows up". > > And it's true that the main traditional use is ptrace. > > But from the patch itself it becomes obvious that no, it's not *just* > ptrace. At least not yet. > > It's used for get_arg_page(), which uses it to basically look up (and > install) pages in the newly created VM. > > Now, I'm not entirely sure why it even uses FOLL_FORCE, - I think it > might be historical, because the target should always be the new stack > vma. > > Following the history of it is a big of a mess, because there's a > number of renamings and re-organizations, but it seems to go back to > 2007 and commit b6a2fea39318 ("mm: variable length argument support"). > Right. > Before that commit, we kept our own array of "this is the set of pages > that I will install in the new VM". That commit basically just inserts > the pages directly into the VM instead, getting rid of the array size > limitation. > > So at a minimum, I think that FOLL_FORCE would need to be removed > before any renaming to FOLL_PTRACE, because that's not some kind of > small random case. > > It *might* be as simple as just removing it, but maybe there's some > reason for having it that I don't immediately see. Right, I have the same feeling. It might just be a copy-and-paste legacy leftover. > > There _are_ also small random cases too, like get_cmdline(). Maybe > that counts as ptrace, but the execve() case most definitely does not. I agree. I'd suggest moving forward without this (last) patch for now and figuring out how to further cleanup FOLL_FORCE usage on top. @Andrew, if you intend to put this into mm-unstable, please drop the last patch for now. -- Thanks, David / dhildenb