Re: [PATCH 3/3] x86/efi: Use efi_switch_mm() rather than manually twiddling with cr3

Mark Rutland
2017-08-16T17:16:09Z

On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 09:14:41AM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 5:57 AM, Matt Fleming <matt@codeblueprint.co.uk> wrote:
> > On Wed, 16 Aug, at 12:03:22PM, Mark Rutland wrote:
> >>
> >> I'd expect we'd abort at a higher level, not taking any sample. i.e.
> >> we'd have the core overflow handler check in_funny_mm(), and if so, skip
> >> the sample, as with the skid case.
> >
> > FYI, this is my preferred solution for x86 too.
>
> One option for the "funny mm" flag would be literally the condition
> current->mm != current->active_mm. I *think* this gets all the cases
> right as long as efi_switch_mm is careful with its ordering and that
> the arch switch_mm() code can handle the resulting ordering. (x86's
> can now, I think, or at least will be able to in 4.14 -- not sure
> about other arches).

For arm64 we'd have to rework things a bit to get the ordering right
(especially when we flip to/from the idmap), but otherwise this sounds sane to
me.

> That being said, there's a totally different solution: run EFI
> callbacks in a kernel thread. This has other benefits: we could run
> those callbacks in user mode some day, and doing *that* in a user
> thread seems like a mistake.

I think that wouldn't work for CPU-bound perf events (which are not
ctx-switched with the task).

It might be desireable to do that anyway, though.

Thanks,
Mark.