Re: [PATCH 1/4] mm: Trial do_wp_page() simplification

Jason Gunthorpe
2020-09-15T19:39:47Z

On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 03:13:46PM -0400, Peter Xu wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 03:29:33PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 01:05:53PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 10:50:40AM -0400, Peter Xu wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 08:28:51PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > > > Yes, this stuff does pin_user_pages_fast() and MADV_DONTFORK
> > > > > together. It sets FOLL_FORCE and FOLL_WRITE to get an exclusive copy
> > > > > of the page and MADV_DONTFORK was needed to ensure that a future fork
> > > > > doesn't establish a COW that would break the DMA by moving the
> > > > > physical page over to the fork. DMA should stay with the process that
> > > > > called pin_user_pages_fast() (Is MADV_DONTFORK still needed with
> > > > > recent years work to GUP/etc? It is a pretty terrible ancient thing)
> > > >
> > > > ... Now I'm more confused on what has happened.
> > >
> > > I'm going to try to confirm that the MADV_DONTFORK is actually being
> > > done by userspace properly, more later.
> >
> > It turns out the test is broken and does not call MADV_DONTFORK when
> > doing forks - it is an opt-in it didn't do.
> >
> > It looks to me like this patch makes it much more likely that the COW
> > break after page pinning will end up moving the pinned physical page
> > to the fork while before it was not very common. Does that make sense?
>
> My understanding is that the fix should not matter much with current failing
> test case, as long as it's with FOLL_FORCE & FOLL_WRITE. However what I'm not
> sure is what if the RDMA/DMA buffers are designed for pure read from userspace.

No, they are write. Always FOLL_WRITE.

> E.g. for vfio I'm looking at vaddr_get_pfn() where I believe such pure read
> buffers will be a GUP with FOLL_PIN and !FOLL_WRITE which will finally pass to
> pin_user_pages_remote(). So what I'm worrying is something like this:

I think the !(prot & IOMMU_WRITE) case is probably very rare for
VFIO. I'm also not sure it will work reliably, in RDMA we had this as
a more common case and long ago found bugs. The COW had to be broken
for the pin anyhow.

> 1. Proc A gets a private anon page X for DMA, mapcount==refcount==1.
>
> 2. Proc A fork()s and gives birth to proc B, page X will now have
> mapcount==refcount==2, write-protected. proc B quits. Page X goes back
> to mapcount==refcount==1 (note! without WRITE bits set in the PTE).

> 3. pin_user_pages(write=false) for page X. Since it's with !FORCE & !WRITE,
> no COW needed. Refcount==2 after that.
>
> 4. Pass these pages to device. We either setup IOMMU page table or just use
> the PFNs, which is not important imho - the most important thing is the
> device will DMA into page X no matter what.
>
> 5. Some thread of proc A writes to page X, trigger COW since it's
> write-protected with mapcount==1 && refcount==2. The HVA that pointing to
> page X will be changed to point to another page Y after the COW.
>
> 6. Device DMA happens, data resides on X. Proc A can never get the data,
> though, because it's looking at page Y now.

RDMA doesn't ever use !WRITE

I'm guessing #5 is the issue, just with a different ordering. If the
#3 pin_user_pages() preceeds the #2 fork, don't we get to the same #5?

> If this is a problem, we may still need the fix patch (maybe not as urgent as
> before at least). But I'd like to double confirm, just in case I miss some
> obvious facts above.

I'm worred that the sudden need to have MAD_DONTFORK is going to be a
turn into a huge regression. It already blew up our first level of
synthetic test cases. I'm worried what we will see when the
application suite is run in a few months :\

> > Given that the tests are wrong it seems like broken userspace,
> > however, it also worked reliably for a fairly long time.
>
> IMHO it worked because the page to do RDMA has mapcount==1, so it was reused
> previously just as-is even after the fork without MADV_DONTFORK and after the
> child quits.

That would match the results we see.. So this patch changes things so
it is not re-used as-is, but replaced with Y?

This basically means any driver using pin_user_pages() can no longer
have fork() in userspace, when before fork() only failed in fairly
narrow cases. Unfortunately I think this will break things broadly
beyond RDMA.

Jason