mm: do not allow MADV_PAGEOUT for CoW pages
authorMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Sun, 22 Mar 2020 01:22:26 +0000 (18:22 -0700)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Wed, 25 Mar 2020 07:25:57 +0000 (08:25 +0100)
commit69f434a05fb4ed71684f1bd06391bf1e70a65288
treef2b53f2b6d58cf5dd864925c50484c723d049096
parentc3f54f0a68bfc7c285890b1b2e0d78abe29d3f3a
mm: do not allow MADV_PAGEOUT for CoW pages

commit 12e967fd8e4e6c3d275b4c69c890adc838891300 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: 9c276cc65a58 ("mm: introduce MADV_COLD")
Reported-by: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Vlastimil 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: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
mm/madvise.c