Re: [PATCHv4 2/2] mm/page_poisoning.c: Allow for zero poisoning

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On 03/04/2016 04:07 PM, Andrew Morton wrote:
On Fri,  4 Mar 2016 15:50:48 -0800 Laura Abbott <labbott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


By default, page poisoning uses a poison value (0xaa) on free. If this
is changed to 0, the page is not only sanitized but zeroing on alloc
with __GFP_ZERO can be skipped as well. The tradeoff is that detecting
corruption from the poisoning is harder to detect. This feature also
cannot be used with hibernation since pages are not guaranteed to be
zeroed after hibernation.

Credit to Grsecurity/PaX team for inspiring this work

--- a/kernel/power/hibernate.c
+++ b/kernel/power/hibernate.c
@@ -1158,6 +1158,22 @@ static int __init kaslr_nohibernate_setup(char *str)
  	return nohibernate_setup(str);
  }

+static int __init page_poison_nohibernate_setup(char *str)
+{
+#ifdef CONFIG_PAGE_POISONING_ZERO
+	/*
+	 * The zeroing option for page poison skips the checks on alloc.
+	 * since hibernation doesn't save free pages there's no way to
+	 * guarantee the pages will still be zeroed.
+	 */
+	if (!strcmp(str, "on")) {
+		pr_info("Disabling hibernation due to page poisoning\n");
+		return nohibernate_setup(str);
+	}
+#endif
+	return 1;
+}

It seems a bit unfriendly to silently accept the boot option but not
actually do anything with it.  Perhaps a `#else pr_info("sorry")' is
needed.

But I bet we made the same mistake in 1000 other places.

What happens if page_poison_nohibernate_setup() simply doesn't exist
when CONFIG_PAGE_POISONING_ZERO=n?  It looks like
kernel/params.c:parse_args() says "Unknown parameter".



I didn't see that behavior when I tested, even with nonsense parameters.
It looks like it might fall back to some other behavior before giving
-ENOENT?

It's also worth noting the page_poison= option is also parsed in
mm/page_poison.c to do other on/off of the poisoning feature. The
option code supported it and it seemed to match better with what the
existing hibernate code was doing with turning off options.

Thanks,
Laura

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