Re: [PATCH v9 0/3] mm/gup: disallow GUP writing to file-backed mappings by default

On Thu, May 04, 2023 at 10:27:50PM +0100, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:

Writing to file-backed mappings which require folio dirty tracking using
GUP is a fundamentally broken operation, as kernel write access to GUP
mappings do not adhere to the semantics expected by a file system.

A GUP caller uses the direct mapping to access the folio, which does not
cause write notify to trigger, nor does it enforce that the caller marks
the folio dirty.

The problem arises when, after an initial write to the folio, writeback
results in the folio being cleaned and then the caller, via the GUP
interface, writes to the folio again.

As a result of the use of this secondary, direct, mapping to the folio no
write notify will occur, and if the caller does mark the folio dirty, this
will be done so unexpectedly.

For example, consider the following scenario:-

1. A folio is written to via GUP which write-faults the memory, notifying
   the file system and dirtying the folio.
2. Later, writeback is triggered, resulting in the folio being cleaned and
   the PTE being marked read-only.
3. The GUP caller writes to the folio, as it is mapped read/write via the
   direct mapping.
4. The GUP caller, now done with the page, unpins it and sets it dirty
   (though it does not have to).

This change updates both the PUP FOLL_LONGTERM slow and fast APIs. As
pin_user_pages_fast_only() does not exist, we can rely on a slightly
imperfect whitelisting in the PUP-fast case and fall back to the slow case
should this fail.

[snip]

As discussed at LSF/MM, on the flight over I wrote a little repro [0] which
reliably triggers the ext4 warning by recreating the scenario described
above, using a small userland program and kernel module.

This code is not perfect (plane code :) but does seem to do the job
adequately, also obviously this should only be run in a VM environment
where data loss is acceptable (in my case a small qemu instance).

Hopefully this is useful in some way. Note that I explicitly use
pin_user_pages() without FOLL_LONGTERM here in order to not run into the
mitigation this very patch series provides! Obviously if you revert this
series you can see the same happening with FOLL_LONGTERM set.

I have licensed the code as GPLv2 so anybody's free to do with it as they
will if it's useful in any way!

[0]:https://github.com/lorenzo-stoakes/gup-repro