Re: [GIT PULL] x86/shstk for 6.4

Linus Torvalds
2023-05-06T19:47:24Z

On Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 5:40 PM Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> wrote:
>
> I'd be happy to prepare another pull request for the pile up to there if
> it sounds sane to everyone else.

So I'm going through the original pull request now - I was really
hoping to have been able to do that earlier, but there kept being all
these small pending other issues.

And I'm about a quarter in, haven't even gotten to the meat yet, and
I've already found a bug.

Commit 74fd30bd28e4 ("mm: Make pte_mkwrite() take a VMA") seems to be
just completely broken at least on arm 3-level page tables:

Spot the problem when I distill it down to just a few lines):

-PMD_BIT_FUNC(mkwrite, &= ~L_PMD_SECT_RDONLY);
+static inline pmd_t pmd_mkwrite(pmd_t pmd, struct vm_area_struct *vma)
+{
+ pmd_val(pmd) |= L_PMD_SECT_RDONLY;
+ return pmd;
+}

and I think this whole area was done entirely incorrectly - and that
incorrect approach is then why this bug happened.

I think the first patch should have just have completely mindlessly
renamed every architecture "pmd/pte_mkwrite()" function as
"pmd/pte_mkwrite_kernel()", and added a single

#ifndef pte_mkwrite
static inline pte_t pte_mkwrite(pte_t pte)
{ return pte_mkwrite_kernel(pte); }
#endif

in <linux/pgtable.h>.

IOW, it should make it *completely* obvious that absolutely no
semantic changes happened, and all that happened that it added that
single wrapper layer. And all those architecture changes would be
trivial one-liners.

The only possibly subtle thing would be that some existing

#include <asm/pgtable.h>

include might need to be changed to

#include <linux/pgtable.h>

instead, because we do have a number of users that seem to include
just the bare asm version.

From some quick grepping, I don't think any of them use 'pte_dirty()'
or 'pmd_dirty()', but it needs *checking*.

Then, the "add vma" thing would change the above wrapper to literally
just have the 'vma', but to not use it, and still just call
'pte_mkwrite_kernel(pte)'.

Again, absolutely obvious that there are zero semantic changes to any
architectures that don't care.

And finally - for the only architecture that *does* care, ie x86, do
implement the new pte_mkwrite(vma,pte), and do a

#define pte_mkwrite pte_mkwrite

to let the generic header know that there's now an
architecture-specific version for it, and it shouldn't do that wrapper
that just falls back on the "kernel" version.

End result: all those architectures that do *not* want the vma
argument don't need to do any extra work, and they just implement the
old version, and the only thing that happened was that it was renamed.

Because I really don't want to pull this series as-is, when I found
what looks like a "this broke an architecture that DOES NOT EVEN CARE"
bug in the series.

And yes, my bad for not getting to this earlier to notice this.

Or alternatively - your bad for not going through this with a fine
comb like I started doing.

Linus