Re: [PATCH v1] mm/gup: fix FOLL_FORCE COW security issue and remove FOLL_COW

From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org,
	stable@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	Axel Rasmussen <axelrasmussen@google.com>,
	Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>, Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>,
	Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>,
	Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
	Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>,
	John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v1] mm/gup: fix FOLL_FORCE COW security issue and remove FOLL_COW
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2022 16:07:50 -0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <YvKwhrjnFQJ7trT1@nvidia.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAHk-=wg40EAZofO16Eviaj7mfqDhZ2gVEbvfsMf6gYzspRjYvw@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Aug 09, 2022 at 11:59:45AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> But as a very good approximation, the rule is "absolutely no new
> BUG_ON() calls _ever_". Because I really cannot see a single case
> where "proper error handling and WARN_ON_ONCE()" isn't the right
> thing.

Parallel to this discussion I've had ones where people more or less
say

 Since BUG_ON crashes the machine and Linus says that crashing the
 machine is bad, WARN_ON will also crash the machine if you set the
 panic_on_warn parameter, so it is also bad, thus we shouldn't use
 anything.

I've generally maintained that people who set the panic_on_warn *want*
these crashes, because that is the entire point of it. So we should
use WARN_ON with an error recovery for "can't happen" assertions like
these. I think it is what you are saying here.

Jason