On Thu 20-06-19 17:40:40, Minchan Kim wrote: > > > > Pushing out a shared page cache > > > > is possible even now but this interface gives a much easier tool to > > > > evict shared state and perform all sorts of timing attacks. Unless I am > > > > missing something we should be doing something similar to mincore and > > > > ignore shared pages without a writeable access or at least document why > > > > we do not care. > > > > > > I'm not sure IIUC side channel attach. As you mentioned, without this syscall, > > > 1. they already can do that simply by memory hogging > > > > This is way much more harder for practical attacks because the reclaim > > logic is not fully under the attackers control. Having a direct tool to > > reclaim memory directly then just opens doors to measure the other > > consumers of that memory and all sorts of side channel. > > Not sure it's much more harder. It's really easy on my experience. > Just creating new memory hogger and consume memory step by step until > you newly allocated pages will be reclaimed. You can contain an untrusted application into a memcg and it will only reclaim its own working set. > > > 2. If we need fix MADV_PAGEOUT, that means we need to fix MADV_DONTNEED, too? > > > > nope because MADV_DONTNEED doesn't unmap from other processes. > > Hmm, I don't understand. MADV_PAGEOUT doesn't unmap from other > processes, either. Either I am confused or missing something. shrink_page_list does try_to_unmap and that unmaps from all processes, right? > Could you elborate it a bit more what's your concern? If you manage to unmap from a remote process then you can measure delays implied from the refault and that information can be used to infer what the remote application is doing. -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs
