Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] mm: introduce MAP_FIXED_SAFE

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Fri 17-11-17 00:45:49, John Hubbard wrote:
> On 11/16/2017 04:14 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > [Ups, managed to screw the subject - fix it]
> > 
> > On Thu 16-11-17 11:18:58, Michal Hocko wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >> this has started as a follow up discussion [1][2] resulting in the
> >> runtime failure caused by hardening patch [3] which removes MAP_FIXED
> >> from the elf loader because MAP_FIXED is inherently dangerous as it
> >> might silently clobber and existing underlying mapping (e.g. stack). The
> >> reason for the failure is that some architectures enforce an alignment
> >> for the given address hint without MAP_FIXED used (e.g. for shared or
> >> file backed mappings).
> >>
> >> One way around this would be excluding those archs which do alignment
> >> tricks from the hardening [4]. The patch is really trivial but it has
> >> been objected, rightfully so, that this screams for a more generic
> >> solution. We basically want a non-destructive MAP_FIXED.
> >>
> >> The first patch introduced MAP_FIXED_SAFE which enforces the given
> >> address but unlike MAP_FIXED it fails with ENOMEM if the given range
> >> conflicts with an existing one. The flag is introduced as a completely
> >> new flag rather than a MAP_FIXED extension because of the backward
> >> compatibility. We really want a never-clobber semantic even on older
> >> kernels which do not recognize the flag. Unfortunately mmap sucks wrt.
> >> flags evaluation because we do not EINVAL on unknown flags. On those
> >> kernels we would simply use the traditional hint based semantic so the
> >> caller can still get a different address (which sucks) but at least not
> >> silently corrupt an existing mapping. I do not see a good way around
> >> that. Except we won't export expose the new semantic to the userspace at
> >> all. It seems there are users who would like to have something like that
> >> [5], though. Atomic address range probing in the multithreaded programs
> >> sounds like an interesting thing to me as well, although I do not have
> >> any specific usecase in mind.
> 
> Hi Michal,
> 
> From looking at the patchset, it seems to me that the new MAP_FIXED_SAFE
> (or whatever it ends up being named) *would* be passed through from
> user space. When you say that "we won't export expose the new semantic 
> to the userspace at all", do you mean that glibc won't add it? Or
> is there something I'm missing, that prevents that flag from getting
> from the syscall, to do_mmap()?

I meant that I could make it an internal flag outside of the map_type
space. So the userspace will not be able to use it.
 
> On the usage: there are cases in user space that could probably make
> good use of a no-clobber hint to MAP_FIXED. The user space code
> that surrounds HMM (speaking loosely there--it's really any user space
> code that manages a unified memory address space, across devices)
> often ends up using MAP_FIXED, but MAP_FIXED crams several features
> into one flag: an exact address, an "atomic" switch to the new mapping,
> and unmapping the old mappings. That's pretty overloaded, so being
> able to split it up a bit, by removing one of those features, seems
> useful.

Yes, atomic address range probing sounds useful. I cannot comment on HMM
usage but if you have any more specific I would welcome any links to add
them to the changelog.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs