Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] File Sealing & memfd_create()

[David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com>]

Hi

On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 12:35 AM, Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> wrote:
> The aspect which really worries me is this: the maintenance burden.
> This approach would add some peculiar new code, introducing a rare
> special case: which we might get right today, but will very easily
> forget tomorrow when making some other changes to mm.  If we compile
> a list of danger areas in mm, this would surely belong on that list.

I tried doing the page-replacement in the last 4 days, but honestly,
it's far more complex than I thought. So if no-one more experienced
with mm/ comes up with a simple implementation, I'll have to delay
this for some more weeks.

However, I still wonder why we try to fix this as part of this
patchset. Using FUSE, a DIRECT-IO call can be delayed for an arbitrary
amount of time. Same is true for network block-devices, NFS, iscsi,
maybe loop-devices, ... This means, _any_ once mapped page can be
written to after an arbitrary delay. This can break any feature that
makes FS objects read-only (remounting read-only, setting S_IMMUTABLE,
sealing, ..).

Shouldn't we try to fix the _cause_ of this?

Isn't there a simple way to lock/mark/.. affected vmas in
get_user_pages(_fast)() and release them once done? We could increase
i_mmap_writable on all affected address_space and decrease it on
release. This would at least prevent sealing and could be check on
other operations, too (like setting S_IMMUTABLE).
This should be as easy as checking page_mapping(page) != NULL and then
adjusting ->i_mmap_writable in
get_writable_user_pages/put_writable_user_pages, right?

Thanks
David