[PATCH RFC 00/24] userfaultfd: write protection support

Peter Xu
2019-01-21T07:57:36Z

Hi,

This series implements initial write protection support for
userfaultfd. Currently both shmem and hugetlbfs are not supported
yet, but only anonymous memory.

To be simple, either "userfaultfd-wp" or "uffd-wp" might be used in
later paragraphs.

The whole series can also be found at:

https://github.com/xzpeter/linux/tree/uffd-wp-merged

Any comment would be greatly welcomed. Thanks.

Overview
====================

The uffd-wp work was initialized by Shaohua Li [1], and later
continued by Andrea [2]. This series is based upon Andrea's latest
userfaultfd tree, and it is a continuous works from both Shaohua and
Andrea. Many of the follow up ideas come from Andrea too.

Besides the old MISSING register mode of userfaultfd, the new uffd-wp
support provides another alternative register mode called
UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_WP that can be used to listen to not only missing
page faults but also write protection page faults, or even they can be
registered together. At the same time, the new feature also provides
a new userfaultfd ioctl called UFFDIO_WRITEPROTECT which allows the
userspace to write protect a range or memory or fixup write permission
of faulted pages.

Please refer to the document patch "userfaultfd: wp:
UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_WP documentation update" for more information on
the new interface and what it can do.

The major workflow of an uffd-wp program should be:

1. Register a memory region with WP mode using UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_WP

2. Write protect part of the whole registered region using
UFFDIO_WRITEPROTECT, passing in UFFDIO_WRITEPROTECT_MODE_WP to
show that we want to write protect the range.

3. Start a working thread that modifies the protected pages,
meanwhile listening to UFFD messages.

4. When a write is detected upon the protected range, page fault
happens, a UFFD message will be generated and reported to the
page fault handling thread

5. The page fault handler thread resolves the page fault using the
new UFFDIO_WRITEPROTECT ioctl, but this time passing in
!UFFDIO_WRITEPROTECT_MODE_WP instead showing that we want to
recover the write permission. Before this operation, the fault
handler thread can do anything it wants, e.g., dumps the page to
a persistent storage.

6. The worker thread will continue running with the correctly
applied write permission from step 5.

Currently there are already two projects that are based on this new
userfaultfd feature.

QEMU Live Snapshot: The project provides a way to allow the QEMU
hypervisor to take snapshot of VMs without
stopping the VM [3].

LLNL umap library: The project provides a mmap-like interface and
"allow to have an application specific buffer of
pages cached from a large file, i.e. out-of-core
execution using memory map" [4][5].

Before posting the patchset, this series was smoke tested against QEMU
live snapshot and the LLNL umap library (by doing parallel quicksort
using 128 sorting threads + 80 uffd servicing threads). My sincere
thanks to Marty Mcfadden and Denis Plotnikov for the help along the
way.

Implementation
==============

Patch 1-4: The whole uffd-wp requires the kernel page fault path to
take more than one retries. In the previous works starting
from Shaohua, a new fault flag FAULT_FLAG_ALLOW_UFFD_RETRY
was introduced for this [6]. However in this series we have
dropped that patch, instead the whole work is based on the
recent series "[PATCH RFC v3 0/4] mm: some enhancements to
the page fault mechanism" [7] which removes the assuption
that VM_FAULT_RETRY can only happen once. This four
patches are identital patches but picked up here. Please
refer to the cover letter [7] for more information. More
discussion upstream shows that this work could even benefit
existing use case [8] so please help justify whether
patches 1-4 can be consider to be accepted even earlier
than the rest of the series.

Patch 5-21: Implements the uffd-wp logic. To avoid collision with
existing write protections (e.g., an private anonymous
page can be write protected if it was shared between
multiple processes), a new PTE bit (_PAGE_UFFD_WP) was
introduced to explicitly mark a PTE as userfault
write-protected. A similar bit was also used in the
swap/migration entry (_PAGE_SWP_UFFD_WP) to make sure
even if the pages were swapped or migrated, the uffd-wp
tracking information won't be lost. When resolving a
page fault, we'll do a page copy before hand if the page
was COWed to make sure we won't corrupt any shared
pages. Etc. Please see separated patches for more
details.

Patch 22: Documentation update for uffd-wp

Patch 23,24: Uffd-wp selftests

TODO
=============

- hugetlbfs/shmem support
- performance
- more architectures
- ...

References
==========

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/666187/
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/andrea/aa.git/log/?h=userfault
[3] https://github.com/denis-plotnikov/qemu/commits/background-snapshot-kvm
[4] https://github.com/LLNL/umap
[5] https://llnl-umap.readthedocs.io/en/develop/
[6] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/andrea/aa.git/commit/?h=userfault&id=b245ecf6cf59156966f3da6e6b674f6695a5ffa5
[7] https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/11/21/370
[8] https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/30/64

Andrea Arcangeli (5):
userfaultfd: wp: add the writeprotect API to userfaultfd ioctl
userfaultfd: wp: hook userfault handler to write protection fault
userfaultfd: wp: add WP pagetable tracking to x86
userfaultfd: wp: userfaultfd_pte/huge_pmd_wp() helpers
userfaultfd: wp: add UFFDIO_COPY_MODE_WP

Martin Cracauer (1):
userfaultfd: wp: UFFDIO_REGISTER_MODE_WP documentation update

Peter Xu (15):
mm: gup: rename "nonblocking" to "locked" where proper
mm: userfault: return VM_FAULT_RETRY on signals
mm: allow VM_FAULT_RETRY for multiple times
mm: gup: allow VM_FAULT_RETRY for multiple times
mm: merge parameters for change_protection()
userfaultfd: wp: apply _PAGE_UFFD_WP bit
mm: export wp_page_copy()
userfaultfd: wp: handle COW properly for uffd-wp
userfaultfd: wp: drop _PAGE_UFFD_WP properly when fork
userfaultfd: wp: add pmd_swp_*uffd_wp() helpers
userfaultfd: wp: support swap and page migration
userfaultfd: wp: don't wake up when doing write protect
khugepaged: skip collapse if uffd-wp detected
userfaultfd: selftests: refactor statistics
userfaultfd: selftests: add write-protect test

Shaohua Li (3):
userfaultfd: wp: add helper for writeprotect check
userfaultfd: wp: support write protection for userfault vma range
userfaultfd: wp: enabled write protection in userfaultfd API

Documentation/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.rst | 51 +++++
arch/alpha/mm/fault.c | 4 +-
arch/arc/mm/fault.c | 12 +-
arch/arm/mm/fault.c | 17 +-
arch/arm64/mm/fault.c | 11 +-
arch/hexagon/mm/vm_fault.c | 3 +-
arch/ia64/mm/fault.c | 3 +-
arch/m68k/mm/fault.c | 5 +-
arch/microblaze/mm/fault.c | 3 +-
arch/mips/mm/fault.c | 3 +-
arch/nds32/mm/fault.c | 7 +-
arch/nios2/mm/fault.c | 5 +-
arch/openrisc/mm/fault.c | 3 +-
arch/parisc/mm/fault.c | 4 +-
arch/powerpc/mm/fault.c | 9 +-
arch/riscv/mm/fault.c | 9 +-
arch/s390/mm/fault.c | 14 +-
arch/sh/mm/fault.c | 5 +-
arch/sparc/mm/fault_32.c | 4 +-
arch/sparc/mm/fault_64.c | 4 +-
arch/um/kernel/trap.c | 6 +-
arch/unicore32/mm/fault.c | 10 +-
arch/x86/Kconfig | 1 +
arch/x86/include/asm/pgtable.h | 67 ++++++
arch/x86/include/asm/pgtable_64.h | 8 +-
arch/x86/include/asm/pgtable_types.h | 11 +-
arch/x86/mm/fault.c | 13 +-
arch/xtensa/mm/fault.c | 4 +-
fs/userfaultfd.c | 110 +++++----
include/asm-generic/pgtable.h | 1 +
include/asm-generic/pgtable_uffd.h | 66 ++++++
include/linux/huge_mm.h | 2 +-
include/linux/mm.h | 21 +-
include/linux/swapops.h | 2 +
include/linux/userfaultfd_k.h | 41 +++-
include/trace/events/huge_memory.h | 1 +
include/uapi/linux/userfaultfd.h | 28 ++-
init/Kconfig | 5 +
mm/gup.c | 61 ++---
mm/huge_memory.c | 28 ++-
mm/hugetlb.c | 8 +-
mm/khugepaged.c | 23 ++
mm/memory.c | 28 ++-
mm/mempolicy.c | 2 +-
mm/migrate.c | 7 +
mm/mprotect.c | 99 +++++++--
mm/rmap.c | 6 +
mm/userfaultfd.c | 92 +++++++-
tools/testing/selftests/vm/userfaultfd.c | 222 ++++++++++++++-----
49 files changed, 898 insertions(+), 251 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 include/asm-generic/pgtable_uffd.h

--
2.17.1