On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 07:22:45PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
A driver might set a page logically offline -- PageOffline() -- and
turn the page inaccessible in the hypervisor; after that, access to page
content can be fatal. One example is virtio-mem; while unplugged memory
-- marked as PageOffline() can currently be read in the hypervisor, this
will no longer be the case in the future; for example, when having
a virtio-mem device backed by huge pages in the hypervisor.
Some special PFN walkers -- i.e., /proc/kcore -- read content of random
pages after checking PageOffline(); however, these PFN walkers can race
with drivers that set PageOffline().
Let's introduce page_offline_(begin|end|freeze|thaw) for
synchronizing.
page_offline_freeze()/page_offline_thaw() allows for a subsystem to
synchronize with such drivers, achieving that a page cannot be set
PageOffline() while frozen.
page_offline_begin()/page_offline_end() is used by drivers that care about
such races when setting a page PageOffline().
For simplicity, use a rwsem for now; neither drivers nor users are
performance sensitive.
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand <redacted>
Reviewed-by: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@suse.de>
--
Oscar Salvador
SUSE L3