Thread (34 messages) 34 messages, 6 authors, 2021-11-29

Re: [PATCH 3/3] btrfs: Avoid live-lock in search_ioctl() on hardware with sub-page faults

From: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruenba@redhat.com>
Date: 2021-11-27 03:54:33
Also in: linux-btrfs, linux-fsdevel, lkml

On Sat, Nov 27, 2021 at 12:06 AM Catalin Marinas
[off-list ref] wrote:
On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 11:29:45PM +0100, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
quoted
On Thu, Nov 25, 2021 at 11:42 PM Catalin Marinas [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
As per Linus' reply, we can work around this by doing
a sub-page fault_in_writable(point_of_failure, align) where 'align'
should cover the copy_to_user() impreciseness.

(of course, fault_in_writable() takes the full size argument but behind
the scene it probes the 'align' prefix at sub-page fault granularity)
That doesn't make sense; we don't want fault_in_writable() to fail or
succeed depending on the alignment of the address range passed to it.
If we know that the arch copy_to_user() has an error of say maximum 16
bytes (or 15 rather on arm64), we can instead get fault_in_writeable()
to probe the first 16 bytes rather than 1.
That isn't going to help one bit: [raw_]copy_to_user() is allowed to
copy as little or as much as it wants as long as it follows the rules
documented in include/linux/uaccess.h:

[] If copying succeeds, the return value must be 0.  If some data cannot be
[] fetched, it is permitted to copy less than had been fetched; the only
[] hard requirement is that not storing anything at all (i.e. returning size)
[] should happen only when nothing could be copied.  In other words, you don't
[] have to squeeze as much as possible - it is allowed, but not necessary.

When fault_in_writeable() tells us that an address range is accessible
in principle, that doesn't mean that copy_to_user() will allow us to
access it in arbitrary chunks. It's also not the case that
fault_in_writeable(addr, size) is always followed by
copy_to_user(addr, ..., size) for the exact same address range, not
even in this case.

These alignment restrictions have nothing to do with page or sub-page faults.

I'm also fairly sure that passing in an unaligned buffer will send
search_ioctl into an endless loop on architectures with copy_to_user()
alignment restrictions; there don't seem to be any buffer alignment
checks.
quoted
Have a look at the below code to see what I mean.  Function
copy_to_user_nofault_unaligned() should be further optimized, maybe as
mm/maccess.c:copy_from_kernel_nofault() and/or per architecture
depending on the actual alignment rules; I'm not sure.
[...]
quoted
--- a/fs/btrfs/ioctl.c
+++ b/fs/btrfs/ioctl.c
@@ -2051,13 +2051,30 @@ static noinline int key_in_sk(struct btrfs_key *key,
      return 1;
 }

+size_t copy_to_user_nofault_unaligned(void __user *to, void *from, size_t size)
+{
+     size_t rest = copy_to_user_nofault(to, from, size);
+
+     if (rest) {
+             size_t n;
+
+             for (n = size - rest; n < size; n++) {
+                     if (copy_to_user_nofault(to + n, from + n, 1))
+                             break;
+             }
+             rest = size - n;
+     }
+     return rest;
That's what I was trying to avoid. That's basically a fall-back to byte
at a time copy (we do this in copy_mount_options(); at some point we
even had a copy_from_user_exact() IIRC).
We could try 8/4/2 byte chunks if both buffers are 8/4/2-byte aligned.
It's just not clear that it's worth it.
Linus' idea (if I got it correctly) was instead to slightly extend the
probing in fault_in_writeable() for the beginning of the buffer from 1
byte to some per-arch range.

I attempted the above here and works ok:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/arm64/linux.git/log/?h=devel/btrfs-live-lock-fix

but too late to post it this evening, I'll do it in the next day or so
as an alternative to this series.

--
Catalin
Thanks,
Andreas


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