From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail-qg0-f50.google.com (mail-qg0-f50.google.com [209.85.192.50]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B51D16B0073 for ; Thu, 27 Feb 2014 09:01:28 -0500 (EST) Received: by mail-qg0-f50.google.com with SMTP id z60so5757536qgd.9 for ; Thu, 27 Feb 2014 06:01:28 -0800 (PST) Received: from mx1.redhat.com (mx1.redhat.com. [209.132.183.28]) by mx.google.com with ESMTP id x3si2661706qab.188.2014.02.27.06.01.27 for ; Thu, 27 Feb 2014 06:01:28 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <530F451F.9020107@redhat.com> Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 15:01:03 +0100 From: Florian Weimer MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [PATCH v6 00/22] Support ext4 on NV-DIMMs References: <1393337918-28265-1-git-send-email-matthew.r.wilcox@intel.com> In-Reply-To: <1393337918-28265-1-git-send-email-matthew.r.wilcox@intel.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: Matthew Wilcox , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, willy@linux.intel.com On 02/25/2014 03:18 PM, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > One of the primary uses for NV-DIMMs is to expose them as a block device > and use a filesystem to store files on the NV-DIMM. While that works, > it currently wastes memory and CPU time buffering the files in the page > cache. We have support in ext2 for bypassing the page cache, but it > has some races which are unfixable in the current design. This series > of patches rewrite the underlying support, and add support for direct > access to ext4. I'm wondering if there is a potential security issue lurking here. Some distributions use udisks2 to grant permission to local console users to create new loop devices from files. File systems on these block devices are then mounted. This is a replacement for several file systems implemented in user space, and for the users, this is a good thing because the in-kernel implementations are generally of higher quality. What happens if we have DAX support in the entire stack, and an enterprising user mounts a file system? Will she be able to fuzz the file system or binfmt loaders concurrently, changing the bits while they are being read? Currently, it appears that the loop device duplicates pages in the page cache, so this does not seem to be possible, but DAX support might change this. -- Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org