On 10/22/18 12:43 PM, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 06:23:24PM -0700, John Hubbard wrote: >> On 10/11/18 6:20 AM, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: >>> On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 10:49:29AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote: >>> >>>>> This is a real worry. If someone uses a mistaken put_page() then how >>>>> will that bug manifest at runtime? Under what set of circumstances >>>>> will the kernel trigger the bug? >>>> >>>> At runtime such bug will manifest as a page that can never be evicted from >>>> memory. We could warn in put_page() if page reference count drops below >>>> bare minimum for given user pin count which would be able to catch some >>>> issues but it won't be 100% reliable. So at this point I'm more leaning >>>> towards making get_user_pages() return a different type than just >>>> struct page * to make it much harder for refcount to go wrong... >>> >>> At least for the infiniband code being used as an example here we take >>> the struct page from get_user_pages, then stick it in a sgl, and at >>> put_page time we get the page back out of the sgl via sg_page() >>> >>> So type safety will not help this case... I wonder how many other >>> users are similar? I think this is a pretty reasonable flow for DMA >>> with user pages. >>> >> >> That is true. The infiniband code, fortunately, never mixes the two page >> types into the same pool (or sg list), so it's actually an easier example >> than some other subsystems. But, yes, type safety doesn't help there. I can >> take a moment to look around at the other areas, to quantify how much a type >> safety change might help. > > Are most (all?) of the places working with SGLs? I finally put together a spreadsheet, in order to answer this sort of thing. Some notes: a) There are around 100 call sites of either get_user_pages*(), or indirect calls via iov_iter_get_pages*(). b) There are only a few SGL users. Most are ad-hoc, instead: some loop that either can be collapsed nicely into the new put_user_pages*() APIs, or... cannot. c) The real problem is: around 20+ iov_iter_get_pages*() call sites. I need to change both the iov_iter system a little bit, and also change the callers so that they don't pile all the gup-pinned pages into the same page** array that also contains other allocation types. This can be done, it just takes time, that's the good news. > > Maybe we could just have a 'get_user_pages_to_sgl' and 'put_pages_sgl' > sort of interface that handled all this instead of trying to make > something that is struct page based? > > It seems easier to get an extra bit for user/!user in the SGL > datastructure? > So at the moment I don't think we need this *_sgl interface. We need iov_iter* changes instead. thanks, -- John Hubbard NVIDIA