Re: [PATCH v2 1/4] mm: Introduce vm_uffd_ops API

Mike Rapoport
2025-07-02T17:39:42Z

On Wed, Jul 02, 2025 at 06:08:44PM +0100, Nikita Kalyazin wrote:
>
>
> On 02/07/2025 16:56, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 01, 2025 at 10:04:28AM -0700, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jun 30, 2025 at 3:16 AM Lorenzo Stoakes
> > > <lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com> wrote:
> > > > This feels like you're trying to put mm functionality outside of mm?
> > >
> > > To second that, two things stick out for me here:
> > > 1. uffd_copy and uffd_get_folio seem to be at different abstraction
> > > levels. uffd_copy is almost the entire copy operation for VM_SHARED
> > > VMAs while uffd_get_folio is a small part of the continue operation.
> > > 2. shmem_mfill_atomic_pte which becomes uffd_copy for shmem in the
> > > last patch is quite a complex function which itself calls some IMO
> > > pretty internal functions like mfill_atomic_install_pte(). Expecting
> > > modules to implement such functionality seems like a stretch to me but
> > > maybe this is for some specialized modules which are written by mm
> > > experts only?
> >
> > To echo what Liam said - I don't think we can truly rely on expertise here
> > (we make enough mistakes in core mm for that to be a dubious proposition
> > even tere :) and even if experts were involved, having core mm
> > functionality outside of core mm carries significant risk - we are
> > constantly changing things, including assumptions around sensitive topics
> > such as locking (think VMA locking) - having code elsewhere significantly
> > increases the risk of missing things.
> >
> > I am also absolutely, to be frank, not going to accept us EXPORT()'ing
> > anything core.
> >
> > Page table manipulation really must rely in core mm and arch code only, it
> > is easily some of the most subtle, confusing and dangerous code in mm (I
> > have spent subtantial hours banging my head against it recently), and again
> > - subject to constant change.
> >
> > But to come back to Liam's comments and to reiterate what I was referring
> > to earlier, even permitting drivers to have access to VMAs is _highly_
> > problematic and has resulted in very real bugs and subtle issues that took
> > many hours, much stress + gnashing of teeth to adress.
>
> The main target of this change is the implementation of UFFD for
> KVM/guest_memfd (examples: [1], [2]) to avoid bringing KVM-specific code
> into the mm codebase. We usually mean KVM by the "drivers" in this context,
> and it is already somewhat "knowledgeable" of the mm. I don't think there
> are existing use cases for other drivers to implement this at the moment.
>
> Although I can't see new exports in this series, there is now a way to limit
> exports to particular modules [3]. Would it help if we only do it for KVM
> initially (if/when actually needed)?

There were talks about pulling out guest_memfd core into mm, but I don't
remember patches about it. If parts of guest_memfd were already in mm/ that
would make easier to export uffd ops to it.

> [1]
> https://lore.kernel.org/all/114133f5-0282-463d-9d65-3143aa658806@amazon.com/
> [2]
> https://lore.kernel.org/all/7666ee96-6f09-4dc1-8cb2-002a2d2a29cf@amazon.com/
> [3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/masahiroy/linux-kbuild.git/commit/?h=kbuild&id=707f853d7fa3ce323a6875487890c213e34d81a0
>
> Thanks,
> Nikita
>
> >
> > The very thing of:
> >
> > xxx
> > <hand off sensitive mutable state X, Y, Z to driver>
> > yyy
> >
> > Means that between xxx and yyy we can make literally no assumptions about
> > what just happened to all handed off state. A single instance of this has
> > caused mayhem, if we did this in such a way as to affect the _many_ uffd
> > hooks we could have a realy serious problem.
> >
> > So - what seems really positive about this series is the _generalisation_
> > and _abstraction_ of uffd functionality.
> >
> > That is something I appreciate and I think uffd sorely needs, in fact if we
> > could find a way to not need to do:
> >
> > if (some_uffd_predicate())
> > some_uffd_specific_fn();
> >
> > That'd be incredible.
> >
> > So I think the answer here is to do something like this, and to keep all
> > the mm-specific code in core mm.
> >
> > Thanks, Lorenzo
>

--
Sincerely yours,
Mike.