On Tue, Nov 19, 2024 at 7:52 AM Jann Horn <jannh@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 19, 2024 at 2:30 AM Pasha Tatashin > <pasha.tatashin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Can you point me to where a refcounted reference to the page comes > > > from when page_detective_metadata() calls dump_page_lvl()? > > > > I am sorry, I remembered incorrectly, we are getting reference right > > after dump_page_lvl() in page_detective_memcg() -> folio_try_get(); I > > will move the folio_try_get() to before dump_page_lvl(). > > > > > > > So I think dump_page() in its current form is not something we should > > > > > expose to a userspace-reachable API. > > > > > > > > We use dump_page() all over WARN_ONs in MM code where pages might not > > > > be locked, but this is a good point, that while even the existing > > > > usage might be racy, providing a user-reachable API potentially makes > > > > it worse. I will see if I could add some locking before dump_page(), > > > > or make a dump_page variant that does not do dump_mapping(). > > > > > > To be clear, I am not that strongly opposed to racily reading data > > > such that the data may not be internally consistent or such; but this > > > is a case of racy use-after-free reads that might end up dumping > > > entirely unrelated memory contents into dmesg. I think we should > > > properly protect against that in an API that userspace can invoke. > > > Otherwise, if we race, we might end up writing random memory contents > > > into dmesg; and if we are particularly unlucky, those random memory > > > contents could be PII or authentication tokens or such. > > > > > > I'm not entirely sure what the right approach is here; I guess it > > > makes sense that when the kernel internally detects corruption, > > > dump_page doesn't take references on pages it accesses to avoid > > > corrupting things further. If you are looking at a page based on a > > > userspace request, I guess you could access the page with the > > > necessary locking to access its properties under the normal locking > > > rules? > > > > I will take reference, as we already do that for memcg purpose, but > > have not included dump_page(). > > Note that taking a reference on the page does not make all of > dump_page() fine; in particular, my understanding is that > folio_mapping() requires that the page is locked in order to return a > stable pointer, and some of the code in dump_mapping() would probably > also require some other locks - probably at least on the inode and > maybe also on the dentry, I think? Otherwise the inode's dentry list > can probably change concurrently, and the dentry's name pointer can > change too. Agreed, once reference is taken, the page identity cannot change (i.e. if it is a named page it will stay a named page), but dentry can be renamed. I will look into what can be done to guarantee consistency in the next version. There is also a fallback if locking cannot be reliably resolved (i.e. for performance reasons) where we can make dump_mapping() optionally disabled from dump_page_lvl() with a new argument flag. Thank you, Pasha
