Re: [PATCH 3/6] mm: introduce secretmemfd system call to create "secret" memory areas

Mike Rapoport
2020-07-20T14:21:15Z

On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 01:30:13PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 11:25 AM Mike Rapoport <rppt@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > From: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>
> >
> > Introduce "secretmemfd" system call with the ability to create memory areas
> > visible only in the context of the owning process and not mapped not only
> > to other processes but in the kernel page tables as well.
> >
> > The user will create a file descriptor using the secretmemfd system call
> > where flags supplied as a parameter to this system call will define the
> > desired protection mode for the memory associated with that file
> > descriptor. Currently there are two protection modes:
> >
> > * exclusive - the memory area is unmapped from the kernel direct map and it
> > is present only in the page tables of the owning mm.
> > * uncached - the memory area is present only in the page tables of the
> > owning mm and it is mapped there as uncached.
> >
> > For instance, the following example will create an uncached mapping (error
> > handling is omitted):
> >
> > fd = secretmemfd(SECRETMEM_UNCACHED);
> > ftruncate(fd, MAP_SIZE);
> > ptr = mmap(NULL, MAP_SIZE, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED,
> > fd, 0);
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>
>
> I wonder if this should be more closely related to dmabuf file
> descriptors, which
> are already used for a similar purpose: sharing access to secret memory areas
> that are not visible to the OS but can be shared with hardware through device
> drivers that can import a dmabuf file descriptor.

TBH, I didn't think about dmabuf, but my undestanding is that is this
case memory areas are not visible to the OS because they are on device
memory rather than normal RAM and when dmabuf is backed by the normal
RAM, the memory is visible to the OS.

Did I miss anything?

> Arnd

--
Sincerely yours,
Mike.