[PATCH v3 0/6] Add support for privileged mappings

Mitchel Humpherys mitchelh at codeaurora.org
Fri Jul 22 13:39:45 PDT 2016


On Fri, Jul 22 2016 at 05:51:07 PM, Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 01:36:49PM -0700, Mitchel Humpherys wrote:
>> The following patch to the ARM SMMU driver:
>> 
>>     commit d346180e70b91b3d5a1ae7e5603e65593d4622bc
>>     Author: Robin Murphy <robin.murphy at arm.com>
>>     Date:   Tue Jan 26 18:06:34 2016 +0000
>>     
>>         iommu/arm-smmu: Treat all device transactions as unprivileged
>> 
>> started forcing all SMMU transactions to come through as "unprivileged".
>> The rationale given was that:
>> 
>>   (1) There is no way in the IOMMU API to even request privileged mappings.
>> 
>>   (2) It's difficult to implement a DMA mapper that correctly models the
>>       ARM VMSAv8 behavior of unprivileged-writeable =>
>>       privileged-execute-never.
>> 
>> This series rectifies (1) by introducing an IOMMU API for privileged
>> mappings and implements it in io-pgtable-arm.
>> 
>> This series rectifies (2) by introducing a new dma attribute
>> (DMA_ATTR_PRIVILEGED) for users of the DMA API that need privileged
>> mappings which are inaccessible to lesser-privileged execution levels, and
>> implements it in the arm64 IOMMU DMA mapper.  The one known user (pl330.c)
>> is converted over to the new attribute.
>> 
>> Jordan and Jeremy can provide more info on the use case if needed, but the
>> high level is that it's a security feature to prevent attacks such as [1].
>
> This all looks good to me:
>
> Acked-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com>
>
> It looks pretty fiddly to merge, however. How are you planning to get
> this upstream?

Fiddly in what way?  Do you mean in relation to "dma-mapping: Use
unsigned long for dma_attrs" [1]?  I admit I wasn't aware of that
activity until Robin mentioned it.  It looks like it's merged on
next/master, shall I rebase/rework on that and resend?

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/7/13/198


-Mitch

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