On 09/15/2019 08:05 AM, Balbir Singh wrote:

On 3/9/19 7:45 pm, Anshuman Khandual wrote:

quoted

The arm64 page table dump code can race with concurrent modification of the
kernel page tables. When a leaf entries are modified concurrently, the dump
code may log stale or inconsistent information for a VA range, but this is
otherwise not harmful.

When intermediate levels of table are freed, the dump code will continue to
use memory which has been freed and potentially reallocated for another
purpose. In such cases, the dump code may dereference bogus addresses,
leading to a number of potential problems.

Intermediate levels of table may by freed during memory hot-remove,
which will be enabled by a subsequent patch. To avoid racing with
this, take the memory hotplug lock when walking the kernel page table.

Acked-by: David Hildenbrand <redacted>
Acked-by: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Anshuman Khandual <redacted>
---
 arch/arm64/mm/ptdump_debugfs.c | 4 ++++
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)

diff --git a/arch/arm64/mm/ptdump_debugfs.c b/arch/arm64/mm/ptdump_debugfs.c
index 064163f25592..b5eebc8c4924 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/mm/ptdump_debugfs.c
+++ b/arch/arm64/mm/ptdump_debugfs.c

@@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
 // SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
 #include <linux/debugfs.h>
+#include <linux/memory_hotplug.h>
 #include <linux/seq_file.h>
 
 #include <asm/ptdump.h>

@@ -7,7 +8,10 @@
 static int ptdump_show(struct seq_file *m, void *v)
 {
 	struct ptdump_info *info = m->private;
+
+	get_online_mems();
 	ptdump_walk_pgd(m, info);
+	put_online_mems();

Looks sane, BTW, checking other arches they might have the same race.

The problem can be present on other architectures which can dump kernel page
table during memory hot-remove operation where it actually frees up page table
pages. If there is no freeing involved the race condition here could cause
inconsistent or garbage information capture for a given VA range. Same is true
even for concurrent vmalloc() operations as well. But removal of page tables
pages can make it worse. Freeing page table pages during hot-remove is a platform
decision, so would be adding these locks while walking kernel page table during
ptdump.

Is there anything special about the arch?

AFAICS, no.

Acked-by: Balbir Singh <bsingharora@gmail.com>

_______________________________________________
linux-arm-kernel mailing list
linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org
http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-arm-kernel