Messages in this thread | | | From | Andy Lutomirski <> | Date | Wed, 02 May 2018 16:19:20 +0000 | Subject | Re: [PATCH 0/6] use memcpy_mcsafe() for copy_to_iter() |
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On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 8:34 PM Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 8:22 PM Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> > wrote:
> > All that to say that having a typical RAM page covering poisoned pmem > > would complicate the 'clear badblocks' implementation.
> Ugh, ok.
> I guess the good news is that your patches aren't so big, and don't really > affect anything else.
I pondered this a bit. Doing better might be a big pain in the arse. The interesting case is where ordinary kernel code (memcpy, plain old memory operands, etc) access faulty pmem. This means that there's no extable entry around. If we actually try to recover, we have a few problems:
- We can't sanely skip the instruction without causing random errors.
- If the access was through the kernel direct map, then we could plausibly remap a different page in place of the faulty page. The problem is that, if the page is *writable* and we share it between more than one faulty page, then we're enabling a giant information leak. But we still need to figure out how we're supposed to invalidate the old mapping from a random, potentially atomic context.
- If the access is through kmap or similar, then we're talking about modifying a PTE out from under kernel code that really isn't expecting us to modify it.
- How are we supposed to signal the process or fail a syscall? The fault could have come from interrupt context, softirq context, kernel thread context, etc, and figuring out who's to blame seems quite awkward and fragile.
All that being said, I suspect that we still have issues even with accesses to user VAs that are protected by extable entries. The whole #MC mechanism is a supremely shitty interface for recoverable errors (especially on Intel), and I'm a bit scared of what happens if the offending access is, say, inside a perf NMI.
Dan, is there any chance you could put some pressure on the architecture folks to invent an entirely new, less shitty way to tell the OS about recoverable memory errors? And to make it testable by normal people? Needing big metal EINJ hardware to test the house of cards that is #MC is just awful and means that there are few enough kernel developers that are actually able to test that I can probably count them on one hand. And I'm not one of them...
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