On 21.10.24 22:11, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
On 10/20/24 18:20, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
Implement a new lightweight guard page feature, that is regions of userland virtual memory that, when accessed, cause a fatal signal to arise.
Currently users must establish PROT_NONE ranges to achieve this.
However this is very costly memory-wise - we need a VMA for each and every one of these regions AND they become unmergeable with surrounding VMAs.
In addition repeated mmap() calls require repeated kernel context switches and contention of the mmap lock to install these ranges, potentially also having to unmap memory if installed over existing ranges.
The lightweight guard approach eliminates the VMA cost altogether - rather than establishing a PROT_NONE VMA, it operates at the level of page table entries - poisoning PTEs such that accesses to them cause a fault followed by a SIGSGEV signal being raised.
This is achieved through the PTE marker mechanism, which a previous commit in this series extended to permit this to be done, installed via the generic page walking logic, also extended by a prior commit for this purpose.
These poison ranges are established with MADV_GUARD_POISON, and if the range in which they are installed contain any existing mappings, they will be zapped, i.e. free the range and unmap memory (thus mimicking the behaviour of MADV_DONTNEED in this respect).
Any existing poison entries will be left untouched. There is no nesting of poisoned pages.
Poisoned ranges are NOT cleared by MADV_DONTNEED, as this would be rather unexpected behaviour, but are cleared on process teardown or unmapping of memory ranges.
Ranges can have the poison property removed by MADV_GUARD_UNPOISON - 'remedying' the poisoning. The ranges over which this is applied, should they contain non-poison entries, will be untouched, only poison entries will be cleared.
We permit this operation on anonymous memory only, and only VMAs which are non-special, non-huge and not mlock()'d (if we permitted this we'd have to drop locked pages which would be rather counterintuitive).
Suggested-by: Vlastimil Babka vbabka@suse.cz Suggested-by: Jann Horn jannh@google.com Suggested-by: David Hildenbrand david@redhat.com Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Stoakes lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com
<snip>
+static long madvise_guard_poison(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
struct vm_area_struct **prev,unsigned long start, unsigned long end)+{
- long err;
- *prev = vma;
- if (!is_valid_guard_vma(vma, /* allow_locked = */false))
return -EINVAL;- /*
* If we install poison markers, then the range is no longer* empty from a page table perspective and therefore it's* appropriate to have an anon_vma.** This ensures that on fork, we copy page tables correctly.*/- err = anon_vma_prepare(vma);
- if (err)
return err;- /*
* Optimistically try to install the guard poison pages first. If any* non-guard pages are encountered, give up and zap the range before* trying again.*/Should the page walker become powerful enough to handle this in one go? :) But sure, if it's too big a task to teach it to zap ptes with all the tlb flushing etc (I assume it's something page walkers don't do today), it makes sense to do it this way. Or we could require userspace to zap first (MADV_DONTNEED), but that would unnecessarily mean extra syscalls for the use case of an allocator debug mode that wants to turn freed memory to guards to catch use after free. So this seems like a good compromise...
Yes please, KIS. We can always implement support for that later if really required (leave behavior open when documenting).