[PATCH RFC 05/19] mm: add early FAULT_FLAG_WRITE consistency checks

[Nadav Amit]

On Nov 7, 2022, at 11:27 AM, David Hildenbrand <david at redhat.com> wrote:

> !! External Email
> 
> On 07.11.22 20:03, Nadav Amit wrote:
>> On Nov 7, 2022, at 8:17 AM, David Hildenbrand <david at redhat.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> !! External Email
>>> 
>>> Let's catch abuse of FAULT_FLAG_WRITE early, such that we don't have to
>>> care in all other handlers and might get "surprises" if we forget to do
>>> so.
>>> 
>>> Write faults without VM_MAYWRITE don't make any sense, and our
>>> maybe_mkwrite() logic could have hidden such abuse for now.
>>> 
>>> Write faults without VM_WRITE on something that is not a COW mapping is
>>> similarly broken, and e.g., do_wp_page() could end up placing an
>>> anonymous page into a shared mapping, which would be bad.
>>> 
>>> This is a preparation for reliable R/O long-term pinning of pages in
>>> private mappings, whereby we want to make sure that we will never break
>>> COW in a read-only private mapping.
>>> 
>>> Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand <david at redhat.com>
>>> ---
>>> mm/memory.c | 8 ++++++++
>>> 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+)
>>> 
>>> diff --git a/mm/memory.c b/mm/memory.c
>>> index fe131273217a..826353da7b23 100644
>>> --- a/mm/memory.c
>>> +++ b/mm/memory.c
>>> @@ -5159,6 +5159,14 @@ static vm_fault_t sanitize_fault_flags(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
>>>                 */
>>>                if (!is_cow_mapping(vma->vm_flags))
>>>                        *flags &= ~FAULT_FLAG_UNSHARE;
>>> +       } else if (*flags & FAULT_FLAG_WRITE) {
>>> +               /* Write faults on read-only mappings are impossible ... */
>>> +               if (WARN_ON_ONCE(!(vma->vm_flags & VM_MAYWRITE)))
>>> +                       return VM_FAULT_SIGSEGV;
>>> +               /* ... and FOLL_FORCE only applies to COW mappings. */
>>> +               if (WARN_ON_ONCE(!(vma->vm_flags & VM_WRITE) &&
>>> +                                !is_cow_mapping(vma->vm_flags)))
>>> +                       return VM_FAULT_SIGSEGV;
>> 
>> Not sure about the WARN_*(). Seems as if it might trigger in benign even if
>> rare scenarios, e.g., mprotect() racing with page-fault.
> 
> We most certainly would want to catch any such broken/racy cases. There
> are no benign cases I could possibly think of.
> 
> Page faults need the mmap lock in read. mprotect() / VMA changes need
> the mmap lock in write. Whoever calls handle_mm_fault() is supposed to
> properly check VMA permissions.

My bad. I now see it. Thanks for explaining.