Re: [PATCH v2 09/17] mm: Add unsafe_follow_pfn

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>]

Em Sat, 10 Oct 2020 12:53:49 +0200
Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch> escreveu:

> Hi Mauro,
> 
> You might want to read the patches more carefully, because what you're
> demanding is what my patches do. Short summary:
> 
> - if STRICT_FOLLOW_PFN is set:
> a) normal memory is handled as-is (i.e. your example works) through
> the addition of FOLL_LONGTERM. This is the "pin the pages correctly"
> approach you're demanding
> b) for non-page memory (zerocopy sharing before dma-buf was upstreamed
> is the only use-case for this) it is correctly rejected with -EINVAL
> 
> - if you do have blobby userspace which requires the zero-copy using
> userptr to work, and doesn't have any of the fallbacks implemented
> that you describe, this would be a regression. That's why
> STRICT_FOLLOW_PFN can be unset. And yes there's a real security issue
> in this usage, Marek also confirmed that the removal of the vma copy
> code a few years ago essentially broke even the weak assumptions that
> made the code work 10+ years ago when it was merged.
> 
> so tdlr; Everything you described will keep working even with the new
> flag set, and everything you demand must be implemented _is_
> implemented in this patch series.
> 
> Also please keep in mind that we are _not_ talking about the general
> userptr support that was merge ~20 years ago. This patch series here
> is _only_ about the zerocpy userptr support merged with 50ac952d2263
> ("[media] videobuf2-dma-sg: Support io userptr operations on io
> memory") in 2013.

Ok, now it is making more sense. Please update the comments for
patch 10/17 to describe the above.

We need some time to test this though, in order to check if no
regressions were added (except the ones due to changeset 50ac952d2263).

> 
> Why this hack was merged in 2013 when we merged dma-buf almost 2 years
> before that I have no idea about. Imo that patch simply should never
> have landed, and instead dma-buf support prioritized.

If I recall correctly, we didn't have any DMABUF support
at the media subsystem, back on 2013.

It took some time for the DMA-BUF to arrive at media, as this
was not a top priority. Also, there aren't many developers that
understand the memory model well enough to implement DMA-BUF support
and touch the VB2 code, which is quite complex, as it supports
lots of different ways for I/O, plus works with vmalloc, DMA
contig and DMA scatter/gather. 

Changes there should carefully be tested against different
drivers, in order to avoid regressions on it.

> Cheers, Daniel

Thanks,
Mauro