Re: [RFC PATCH v2 1/3] mm/gup: fix gup_fast with dynamic page table folding

Gerald Schaefer
2020-09-09T12:29:04Z

On Tue, 8 Sep 2020 07:30:50 -0700
Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> wrote:

> On 9/7/20 11:00 AM, Gerald Schaefer wrote:
> > Commit 1a42010cdc26 ("s390/mm: convert to the generic get_user_pages_fast
> > code") introduced a subtle but severe bug on s390 with gup_fast, due to
> > dynamic page table folding.
>
> Would it be fair to say that the "fake" page table entries s390
> allocates on the stack are what's causing the trouble here? That might
> be a nice thing to open up with here. "Dynamic page table folding"
> really means nothing to me.

Sorry, I guess my previous reply does not really explain "what the heck
is dynamic page table folding?".

On s390, we can have different number of page table levels for different
processes / mms. We always start with 3 levels, and update dynamically
on process demand to 4 or 5 levels, hence the dynamic folding. Still,
the PxD_SIZE/SHIFT is defined statically, so that e.g. pXd_addr_end() will
not reflect this dynamic behavior.

For the various pagetable walkers using pXd_addr_end() (w/o READ_ONCE
logic) this is no problem. With static folding, iteration over the folded
levels will always happen at pgd level (top-level folding). For s390,
we stay at the respective level and iterate there (dynamic middle-level
folding), only return to pgd level if there really were 5 levels.

This only works well as long there are real pagetable pointers involved,
that can also be used for iteration. For gup_fast, or any other future
pagetable walkers using the READ_ONCE logic w/o lock, that is not true.
There are pointers involved to local pXd values on the stack, because of
the READ_ONCE logic, and our middle-level iteration will suddenly iterate
over such stack pointers instead of pagetable pointers.

This will be addressed by making the pXd_addr_end() dynamic, for which
we need to see the pXd value in order to determine its level / type.