Kernel related (?) user space crash at ARM11 MPCore
Russell King - ARM Linux
linux at arm.linux.org.uk
Mon Sep 21 06:07:51 EDT 2009
On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 10:44:23AM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> I would still call this I-D cache coherency issue since the two caches
> have a different view of the RAM but I agree that the D-cache is the one
> holding the data (with a slight chance for the I-cache not to be in sync
> with main RAM, though we could treat it separately).
>
> We can sort out the D-cache issue with your approach for cleaning it in
> the copy_user_highpage() function, but, as I said, we affect the
> standard CoW mechanism for data pages quite a lot.
Let me restate my approach more clearly:
1. Remember that a VMA has been executable.
2. Only do the additional handing if the VMA has been executable.
> Since the latest dynamic linker was fixed already to avoid writing to a
> text page, we would penalise (with either solution) user-space in the
> future even if it doesn't need this.
Great - that means a previously executable region won't be COWed anymore,
and so my patch will have no measurable impact.
> > The instruction cache issue is an entirely separate problem.
>
> We would need to fix this somehow as well. We currently handle the
> I-cache in update_mmu_cache() when a page is first mapped if it has
> VM_EXEC set.
The reason I'm pushing you hard to separate the two issues is that the
two should be treated separately. I think we need to consider ensuring
that freed pages do not have any I-cache lines associated with them,
rather than waiting for them to be allocated and then dealing with the
I-cache problem.
We need to measure what the impact of that would be.
> But mprotect() or change_protection() don't seem to call this.
That's because update_mmu_cache() is a TLB interface, not a cache
interface. You'd have to call update_mmu_cache() for every individual
page. See cachetlb.txt.
> Should we mandate a cacheflush syscall in user space when calling
> mprotect(RX)? I don't think people are expecting this.
It is not clear what effect mprotect() with harvard caches should have
on I+D coherency - certainly there's no behavioural requirements in
this regard specified by POSIX.
Given that if you have a RWX region you have to deal with the coherency
issue in userspace already, I don't see mprotect() being any different
in this regard.
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