On Wed, 6 Mar 2019, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > The semantics of what mincore() considers to be resident is not completely
> > clear, but Linux has always (since 2.3.52, which is when mincore() was
> > initially done) treated it as "page is available in page cache".
> >
> > That's potentially a problem, as that [in]directly exposes meta-information
> > about pagecache / memory mapping state even about memory not strictly belonging
> > to the process executing the syscall, opening possibilities for sidechannel
> > attacks.
> >
> > Change the semantics of mincore() so that it only reveals pagecache information
> > for non-anonymous mappings that belog to files that the calling process could
> > (if it tried to) successfully open for writing.
>
> "for writing" comes as a bit of a surprise. Why not for reading?
I guess this is a rhetorical question from you :) but fair enough, good
point, I'll explain this a bit more in the changelog and in the code
comments.
> > @@ -189,8 +197,13 @@ static long do_mincore(unsigned long addr, unsigned long pages, unsigned char *v
> > vma = find_vma(current->mm, addr);
> > if (!vma || addr < vma->vm_start)
> > return -ENOMEM;
> > - mincore_walk.mm = vma->vm_mm;
> > end = min(vma->vm_end, addr + (pages << PAGE_SHIFT));
> > + if (!can_do_mincore(vma)) {
> > + unsigned long pages = (end - addr) >> PAGE_SHIFT;
>
> I'm not sure this is correct in all cases. If
>
> addr = 4095
> vma->vm_end = 4096
> pages = 1000
>
> then `end' is 4096 and `(end - addr) << PAGE_SHIFT' is zero, but it
> should have been 1.
Good catch! It should rather be something like
unsigned long pages = (end >> PAGE_SHIFT) - (addr >> PAGE_SHIFT);
I'll fix that up and resend tomorrow.
Thanks,
--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs
