Re: clean up and streamline probe_kernel_* and friends v2

[Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>]

On 5/13/20 6:00 PM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> this series start cleaning up the safe kernel and user memory probing
> helpers in mm/maccess.c, and then allows architectures to implement
> the kernel probing without overriding the address space limit and
> temporarily allowing access to user memory.  It then switches x86
> over to this new mechanism by reusing the unsafe_* uaccess logic.
> 
> This version also switches to the saner copy_{from,to}_kernel_nofault
> naming suggested by Linus.
> 
> I kept the x86 helprs as-is without calling unsage_{get,put}_user as
> that avoids a number of hard to trace casts, and it will still work
> with the asm-goto based version easily.

Aside from comments on list, the series looks reasonable to me. For BPF
the bpf_probe_read() helper would be slightly penalized for probing user
memory given we now test on copy_from_kernel_nofault() first and if that
fails only then fall back to copy_from_user_nofault(), but it seems
small enough that it shouldn't matter too much and aside from that we have
the newer bpf_probe_read_kernel() and bpf_probe_read_user() anyway that
BPF progs should use instead, so I think it's okay.

For patch 14 and patch 15, do you roughly know the performance gain with
the new probe_kernel_read_loop() + arch_kernel_read() approach?

Thanks,
Daniel