Re: [PATCH] mm/userfaultfd: provide unmasked address on page-fault

David Hildenbrand
2021-10-08T08:05:44Z

On 08.10.21 01:50, Nadav Amit wrote:
> From: Nadav Amit <namit@vmware.com>
>
> Userfaultfd is supposed to provide the full address (i.e., unmasked) of
> the faulting access back to userspace. However, that is not the case for
> quite some time.
>
> Even running "userfaultfd_demo" from the userfaultfd man page provides
> the wrong output (and contradicts the man page). Notice that
> "UFFD_EVENT_PAGEFAULT event" shows the masked address.
>
> Address returned by mmap() = 0x7fc5e30b3000
>
> fault_handler_thread():
> poll() returns: nready = 1; POLLIN = 1; POLLERR = 0
> UFFD_EVENT_PAGEFAULT event: flags = 0; address = 7fc5e30b3000
> (uffdio_copy.copy returned 4096)
> Read address 0x7fc5e30b300f in main(): A
> Read address 0x7fc5e30b340f in main(): A
> Read address 0x7fc5e30b380f in main(): A
> Read address 0x7fc5e30b3c0f in main(): A
>
> Add a new "real_address" field to vmf to hold the unmasked address. It
> is possible to keep the unmasked address in the existing address field
> (and mask whenever necessary) instead, but this is likely to cause
> backporting problems of this patch.

Can we be sure that no existing users will rely on this behavior that
has been the case since end of 2016 IIRC, one year after UFFD was
upstreamed? I do wonder what the official ABI nowadays is, because man
pages aren't necessarily the source of truth.

I checked QEMU (postcopy live migration), and I think it should be fine
with this change.

If we don't want to change the current ABI behavior, we could add a new
feature flag to change behavior.

@Peter, what are your thoughts?

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb