Re: [PATCH v6 1/5] vfs: add flags parameter to ->mmap() in 'struct file_operations'

Christoph Hellwig
2017-08-24T16:58:43Z

On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 04:48:40PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> We are running running short of vma->vm_flags. We can avoid needing a
> new VM_* flag in some cases if the original @flags submitted to mmap(2)
> is made available to the ->mmap() 'struct file_operations'
> implementation. For example, the proposed addition of MAP_DIRECT can be
> implemented without taking up a new vm_flags bit. Another motivation to
> avoid vm_flags is that they appear in /proc/$pid/smaps, and we have seen
> software that tries to dangerously (TOCTOU) read smaps to infer the
> behavior of a virtual address range.
>
> This conversion was performed by the following semantic patch. There
> were a few manual edits for oddities like proc_reg_mmap.
>
> Thanks to Julia for helping me with coccinelle iteration to cover cases
> where the mmap routine is defined in a separate file from the 'struct
> file_operations' instance that consumes it.

How are we going to check that an instance actually supports any
of those flags?