Re: [PATCH v3 20/23] fs: Allow copy_mount_options() to access user-space in a single pass

From: Dave Martin <dave.martin@arm.com>
To: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Cc: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org, linux-arch@vger.kernel.org,
	Richard Earnshaw <Richard.Earnshaw@arm.com>,
	Szabolcs Nagy <szabolcs.nagy@arm.com>,
	Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@google.com>,
	Kevin Brodsky <kevin.brodsky@arm.com>,
	Peter Collingbourne <pcc@google.com>,
	linux-mm@kvack.org, Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
	Vincenzo Frascino <vincenzo.frascino@arm.com>,
	Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 20/23] fs: Allow copy_mount_options() to access user-space in a single pass
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2020 17:56:42 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200427165641.GC15808@arm.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200421142603.3894-21-catalin.marinas@arm.com>

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 03:26:00PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> The copy_mount_options() function takes a user pointer argument but not
> a size. It tries to read up to a PAGE_SIZE. However, copy_from_user() is
> not guaranteed to return all the accessible bytes if, for example, the
> access crosses a page boundary and gets a fault on the second page. To
> work around this, the current copy_mount_options() implementations
> performs to copy_from_user() passes, first to the end of the current
> page and the second to what's left in the subsequent page.
> 
> Some architectures like arm64 can guarantee an exact copy_from_user()
> depending on the size (since the arch function performs some alignment
> on the source register). Introduce an arch_has_exact_copy_from_user()
> function and allow copy_mount_options() to perform the user access in a
> single pass.
> 
> While this function is not on a critical path, the single-pass behaviour
> is required for arm64 MTE (memory tagging) support where a uaccess can
> trigger intra-page faults (tag not matching). With the current
> implementation, if this happens during the first page, the function will
> return -EFAULT.

Do you know how much extra overhead we'd incur if we read at must one
tag granule at a time, instead of PAGE_SIZE?

I'm guessing that in practice strcpy_from_user() type operations copy
much less than a page most of the time, so what we lose in uaccess
overheads we _might_ regain in less redundant copying.

Would need behchmarking though.

[...]

Cheers
---Dave