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Commit 69f434a0 authored by Michal Hocko's avatar Michal Hocko Committed by Greg Kroah-Hartman
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mm: do not allow MADV_PAGEOUT for CoW pages

commit 12e967fd upstream.

Jann has brought up a very interesting point [1].  While shared pages
are excluded from MADV_PAGEOUT normally, CoW pages can be easily
reclaimed that way.  This can lead to all sorts of hard to debug
problems.  E.g.  performance problems outlined by Daniel [2].

There are runtime environments where there is a substantial memory
shared among security domains via CoW memory and a easy to reclaim way
of that memory, which MADV_{COLD,PAGEOUT} offers, can lead to either
performance degradation in for the parent process which might be more
privileged or even open side channel attacks.

The feasibility of the latter is not really clear to me TBH but there is
no real reason for exposure at this stage.  It seems there is no real
use case to depend on reclaiming CoW memory via madvise at this stage so
it is much easier to simply disallow it and this is what this patch
does.  Put it simply MADV_{PAGEOUT,COLD} can operate only on the
exclusively owned memory which is a straightforward semantic.

[1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/CAG48ez0G3JkMq61gUmyQAaCq=_TwHbi1XKzWRooxZkv08PQKuw@mail.gmail.com
[2] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/CAKOZueua_v8jHCpmEtTB6f3i9e2YnmX4mqdYVWhV4E=Z-n+zRQ@mail.gmail.com



Fixes: 9c276cc6 ("mm: introduce MADV_COLD")
Reported-by: default avatarJann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: default avatarVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Daniel Colascione <dancol@google.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: "Joel Fernandes (Google)" <joel@joelfernandes.org>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200312082248.GS23944@dhcp22.suse.cz


Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
parent c3f54f0a
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