Re: [PATCH] secretmem: disable memfd_secret() if arch cannot set direct map

Mike Rapoport
2024-10-02T05:14:44Z

On Tue, Oct 01, 2024 at 03:04:38PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Oct 2024 09:00:41 +0100 Patrick Roy <roypat@amazon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > Return -ENOSYS from memfd_secret() syscall if !can_set_direct_map().
> > This is the case for example on some arm64 configurations, where marking
> > 4k PTEs in the direct map not present can only be done if the direct map
> > is set up at 4k granularity in the first place (as ARM's
> > break-before-make semantics do not easily allow breaking apart
> > large/gigantic pages).
> >
> > More precisely, on arm64 systems with !can_set_direct_map(),
> > set_direct_map_invalid_noflush() is a no-op, however it returns success
> > (0) instead of an error. This means that memfd_secret will seemingly
> > "work" (e.g. syscall succeeds, you can mmap the fd and fault in pages),
> > but it does not actually achieve its goal of removing its memory from
> > the direct map.
> >
> > Note that with this patch, memfd_secret() will start erroring on systems
> > where can_set_direct_map() returns false (arm64 with
> > CONFIG_RODATA_FULL_DEFAULT_ENABLED=n, CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC=n and
> > CONFIG_KFENCE=n), but that still seems better than the current silent
> > failure. Since CONFIG_RODATA_FULL_DEFAULT_ENABLED defaults to 'y', most
> > arm64 systems actually have a working memfd_secret() and aren't be
> > affected.
> >
> > >From going through the iterations of the original memfd_secret patch
> > series, it seems that disabling the syscall in these scenarios was the
> > intended behavior [1] (preferred over having
> > set_direct_map_invalid_noflush return an error as that would result in
> > SIGBUSes at page-fault time), however the check for it got dropped
> > between v16 [2] and v17 [3], when secretmem moved away from CMA
> > allocations.
> >
> > [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20201124164930.GK8537@kernel.org/
> > [2]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210121122723.3446-11-rppt@kernel.org/#t
> > [3]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20201125092208.12544-10-rppt@kernel.org/
>
> Thanks.
>
> > Fixes: 1507f51255c9 ("mm: introduce memfd_secret system call to create "secret" memory areas")
>
> So I'm thinking this fix should be backported into kernels which
> contain 1507f51255c9, agree?

Yes

--
Sincerely yours,
Mike.