Re: [kernel-hardening] [PATCH v5 04/10] arm64: Add __flush_tlb_one()

Mark Rutland
2017-08-31T09:48:45Z

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:43:53AM +0200, Juerg Haefliger wrote:
> On 08/30/2017 06:47 PM, Tycho Andersen wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 07:31:25AM +0200, Juerg Haefliger wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On 08/23/2017 07:04 PM, Mark Rutland wrote:
> >>> On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 10:58:42AM -0600, Tycho Andersen wrote:
> >>>> Hi Mark,
> >>>>
> >>>> On Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 05:50:47PM +0100, Mark Rutland wrote:
> >>>>> That said, is there any reason not to use flush_tlb_kernel_range()
> >>>>> directly?
> >>>>
> >>>> So it turns out that there is a difference between __flush_tlb_one() and
> >>>> flush_tlb_kernel_range() on x86: flush_tlb_kernel_range() flushes all the TLBs
> >>>> via on_each_cpu(), where as __flush_tlb_one() only flushes the local TLB (which
> >>>> I think is enough here).
> >>>
> >>> That sounds suspicious; I don't think that __flush_tlb_one() is
> >>> sufficient.
> >>>
> >>> If you only do local TLB maintenance, then the page is left accessible
> >>> to other CPUs via the (stale) kernel mappings. i.e. the page isn't
> >>> exclusively mapped by userspace.
> >>
> >> We flush all CPUs to get rid of stale entries when a new page is
> >> allocated to userspace that was previously allocated to the kernel.
> >> Is that the scenario you were thinking of?
> >
> > I think there are two cases, the one you describe above, where the
> > pages are first allocated, and a second one, where e.g. the pages are
> > mapped into the kernel because of DMA or whatever. In the case you
> > describe above, I think we're doing the right thing (which is why my
> > test worked correctly, because it tested this case).
> >
> > In the second case, when the pages are unmapped (i.e. the kernel is
> > done doing DMA), do we need to flush the other CPUs TLBs? I think the
> > current code is not quite correct, because if multiple tasks (CPUs)
> > map the pages, only the TLB of the last one is flushed when the
> > mapping is cleared, because the tlb is only flushed when ->mapcount
> > drops to zero, leaving stale entries in the other TLBs. It's not clear
> > to me what to do about this case.
>
> For this to happen, multiple CPUs need to have the same userspace page
> mapped at the same time. Is this a valid scenario?

I believe so. I think you could trigger that with a multi-threaded
application running across several CPUs. All those threads would share
the same page tables.

Thanks,
Mark.