Merge tag 'v6.4/kernel.user_worker' of git://git./linux/kernel/git/brauner/linux
Pull user work thread updates from Christian Brauner:
"This contains the work generalizing the ability to create a kernel
worker from a userspace process.
Such user workers will run with the same credentials as the userspace
process they were created from providing stronger security and
accounting guarantees than the traditional override_creds() approach
ever could've hoped for.
The original work was heavily based and optimzed for the needs of
io_uring which was the first user. However, as it quickly turned out
the ability to create user workers inherting properties from a
userspace process is generally useful.
The vhost subsystem currently creates workers using the kthread api.
The consequences of using the kthread api are that RLIMITs don't work
correctly as they are inherited from khtreadd. This leads to bugs
where more workers are created than would be allowed by the RLIMITs of
the userspace process in lieu of which workers are created.
Problems like this disappear with user workers created from the
userspace processes for which they perform the work. In addition,
providing this api allows vhost to remove additional complexity. For
example, cgroup and mm sharing will just work out of the box with user
workers based on the relevant userspace process instead of manually
ensuring the correct cgroup and mm contexts are used.
So the vhost subsystem should simply be made to use the same mechanism
as io_uring. To this end the original mechanism used for
create_io_thread() is generalized into user workers:
- Introduce PF_USER_WORKER as a generic indicator that a given task
is a user worker, i.e., a kernel task that was created from a
userspace process. Now a PF_IO_WORKER thread is just a specialized
version of PF_USER_WORKER. So io_uring io workers raise both flags.
- Make copy_process() available to core kernel code
- Extend struct kernel_clone_args with the following bitfields
allowing to indicate to copy_process():
- to create a user worker (raise PF_USER_WORKER)
- to not inherit any files from the userspace process
- to ignore signals
After all generic changes are in place the vhost subsystem implements
a new dedicated vhost api based on user workers. Finally, vhost is
switched to rely on the new api moving it off of kthreads.
Thanks to Mike for sticking it out and making it through this rather
arduous journey"
* tag 'v6.4/kernel.user_worker' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/brauner/linux:
vhost: use vhost_tasks for worker threads
vhost: move worker thread fields to new struct
vhost_task: Allow vhost layer to use copy_process
fork: allow kernel code to call copy_process
fork: Add kernel_clone_args flag to ignore signals
fork: add kernel_clone_args flag to not dup/clone files
fork/vm: Move common PF_IO_WORKER behavior to new flag
kernel: Make io_thread and kthread bit fields
kthread: Pass in the thread's name during creation
kernel: Allow a kernel thread's name to be set in copy_process
csky: Remove kernel_thread declaration