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

Dan Williams
2017-08-24T17:42:12Z

On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 9:58 AM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:
> 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?

In patch 3 I validate the flags by introducing an
"mmap_supported_mask" field to 'struct file_operations'. It will be
zero by default for almost all implementations and zero means "support
the legacy mmap flags".