Re: Maybe a VM bug in 2.4.18-18 from RH 8.0?

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 04:01:24PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> One way to address this could be to find a way of making the
> pages present, but still cause a fault on first access.  Then
> have a special-case fastpath in the fault handler to really wipe
> the page just before it is used.  I don't know how though - maybe
> _PAGE_USER?

All of the problems there have to do with accounting which pieces of
the page are zeroed. The PTE's map the same size areas (MMUPAGE_SIZE
stays 4KB)... So after a partial zero we end up with a struct page
pointing at MMUPAGE_COUNT mmupages, and a PTE pointing at the one
that's been zeroed and not a whole lot of flag bits left to keep track
of which pieces are initialized. How about a single PG_zero flag and
map out which bits of the thing are already zeroed in page->private?
(basically the swapcache can be considered the owning fs and it then
 then uses page->private for those shenanigans).


On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 04:01:24PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> get_user_pages() would need attention too - you don't want to
> allow the user to perform O_DIRECT writes of uninitialised
> pages to their files...

Well, I'm not sure how that would happen. fs io should deal with
kernel PAGE_SIZE-sized units so we're dealing with anonymous memory
only. O_DIRECT if we perform a write would only find the part of the
page mapped by a PTE, which must have been pre-zeroed prior to being
mapped. Reads seem to be in equally good shape. Perhaps it's more of
"this is yet another things to audit when dealing with it"; I'll admit
that the audit needed for this thing is somewhat large.


Bill