On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 11:58 AM, Luck, Tony <tony.luck@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > How are you envisioning this rate-limiting to be implemented? Are > you going to fail an EFI call if the rate is too high? I'm thinking that > we just add a delay to each call so that we can't exceed the limit. Delaying sounds ok, I guess. But the "obvious" implementation may be simple: static void efi_ratelimit(void) { static DEFINE_RATELIMIT_STATE(ratelimit, HZ, 100); if (!__ratelimit(&ratelimit)) msleep(10); } } but the above is actually completely broken. Why? If you have multiple processes, they can each only do a hundred per second, but globally they can do millions per second by just having a few thousand threads. They all sleep, but.. So how do you restrict it *globally*? If you put this all inside a lock like a mutex, you can generate basically arbitrary delays, and you're back to the DoS schenario. A fair lock will allow thousands of waiters to line up and make the delay be But maybe I'm missing some really obvious way. You *can* make the msleep be a spinning wait instead, and rely on the scheduler, I guess. Or maybe I'm just stupid and am overlooking the obvious case. Again, making the ratelimiting be per-user makes all of these issues go away. Then one user cannot delay another one. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-efi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html