13 Mar, 2013

1 commit

  • Looking at mm/process_vm_access.c:process_vm_rw() and comparing it to
    compat_process_vm_rw() shows that the compatibility code requires an
    explicit "access_ok()" check before calling
    compat_rw_copy_check_uvector(). The same difference seems to appear when
    we compare fs/read_write.c:do_readv_writev() to
    fs/compat.c:compat_do_readv_writev().

    This subtle difference between the compat and non-compat requirements
    should probably be debated, as it seems to be error-prone. In fact,
    there are two others sites that use this function in the Linux kernel,
    and they both seem to get it wrong:

    Now shifting our attention to fs/aio.c, we see that aio_setup_iocb()
    also ends up calling compat_rw_copy_check_uvector() through
    aio_setup_vectored_rw(). Unfortunately, the access_ok() check appears to
    be missing. Same situation for
    security/keys/compat.c:compat_keyctl_instantiate_key_iov().

    I propose that we add the access_ok() check directly into
    compat_rw_copy_check_uvector(), so callers don't have to worry about it,
    and it therefore makes the compat call code similar to its non-compat
    counterpart. Place the access_ok() check in the same location where
    copy_from_user() can trigger a -EFAULT error in the non-compat code, so
    the ABI behaviors are alike on both compat and non-compat.

    While we are here, fix compat_do_readv_writev() so it checks for
    compat_rw_copy_check_uvector() negative return values.

    And also, fix a memory leak in compat_keyctl_instantiate_key_iov() error
    handling.

    Acked-by: Linus Torvalds
    Acked-by: Al Viro
    Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Mathieu Desnoyers
     

01 Jun, 2012

1 commit

  • A cleanup of rw_copy_check_uvector and compat_rw_copy_check_uvector after
    changes made to support CMA in an earlier patch.

    Rather than having an additional check_access parameter to these
    functions, the first paramater type is overloaded to allow the caller to
    specify CHECK_IOVEC_ONLY which means check that the contents of the iovec
    are valid, but do not check the memory that they point to. This is used
    by process_vm_readv/writev where we need to validate that a iovec passed
    to the syscall is valid but do not want to check the memory that it points
    to at this point because it refers to an address space in another process.

    Signed-off-by: Chris Yeoh
    Reviewed-by: Oleg Nesterov
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Christopher Yeoh
     

03 Feb, 2012

1 commit

  • This fixes the race in process_vm_core found by Oleg (see

    http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1235667/

    for details).

    This has been updated since I last sent it as the creation of the new
    mm_access() function did almost exactly the same thing as parts of the
    previous version of this patch did.

    In order to use mm_access() even when /proc isn't enabled, we move it to
    kernel/fork.c where other related process mm access functions already
    are.

    Signed-off-by: Chris Yeoh
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Christopher Yeoh
     

01 Nov, 2011

1 commit

  • The basic idea behind cross memory attach is to allow MPI programs doing
    intra-node communication to do a single copy of the message rather than a
    double copy of the message via shared memory.

    The following patch attempts to achieve this by allowing a destination
    process, given an address and size from a source process, to copy memory
    directly from the source process into its own address space via a system
    call. There is also a symmetrical ability to copy from the current
    process's address space into a destination process's address space.

    - Use of /proc/pid/mem has been considered, but there are issues with
    using it:
    - Does not allow for specifying iovecs for both src and dest, assuming
    preadv or pwritev was implemented either the area read from or
    written to would need to be contiguous.
    - Currently mem_read allows only processes who are currently
    ptrace'ing the target and are still able to ptrace the target to read
    from the target. This check could possibly be moved to the open call,
    but its not clear exactly what race this restriction is stopping
    (reason appears to have been lost)
    - Having to send the fd of /proc/self/mem via SCM_RIGHTS on unix
    domain socket is a bit ugly from a userspace point of view,
    especially when you may have hundreds if not (eventually) thousands
    of processes that all need to do this with each other
    - Doesn't allow for some future use of the interface we would like to
    consider adding in the future (see below)
    - Interestingly reading from /proc/pid/mem currently actually
    involves two copies! (But this could be fixed pretty easily)

    As mentioned previously use of vmsplice instead was considered, but has
    problems. Since you need the reader and writer working co-operatively if
    the pipe is not drained then you block. Which requires some wrapping to
    do non blocking on the send side or polling on the receive. In all to all
    communication it requires ordering otherwise you can deadlock. And in the
    example of many MPI tasks writing to one MPI task vmsplice serialises the
    copying.

    There are some cases of MPI collectives where even a single copy interface
    does not get us the performance gain we could. For example in an
    MPI_Reduce rather than copy the data from the source we would like to
    instead use it directly in a mathops (say the reduce is doing a sum) as
    this would save us doing a copy. We don't need to keep a copy of the data
    from the source. I haven't implemented this, but I think this interface
    could in the future do all this through the use of the flags - eg could
    specify the math operation and type and the kernel rather than just
    copying the data would apply the specified operation between the source
    and destination and store it in the destination.

    Although we don't have a "second user" of the interface (though I've had
    some nibbles from people who may be interested in using it for intra
    process messaging which is not MPI). This interface is something which
    hardware vendors are already doing for their custom drivers to implement
    fast local communication. And so in addition to this being useful for
    OpenMPI it would mean the driver maintainers don't have to fix things up
    when the mm changes.

    There was some discussion about how much faster a true zero copy would
    go. Here's a link back to the email with some testing I did on that:

    http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=130105930902915&w=2

    There is a basic man page for the proposed interface here:

    http://ozlabs.org/~cyeoh/cma/process_vm_readv.txt

    This has been implemented for x86 and powerpc, other architecture should
    mainly (I think) just need to add syscall numbers for the process_vm_readv
    and process_vm_writev. There are 32 bit compatibility versions for
    64-bit kernels.

    For arch maintainers there are some simple tests to be able to quickly
    verify that the syscalls are working correctly here:

    http://ozlabs.org/~cyeoh/cma/cma-test-20110718.tgz

    Signed-off-by: Chris Yeoh
    Cc: Ingo Molnar
    Cc: "H. Peter Anvin"
    Cc: Thomas Gleixner
    Cc: Arnd Bergmann
    Cc: Paul Mackerras
    Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt
    Cc: David Howells
    Cc: James Morris
    Cc:
    Cc:
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Christopher Yeoh