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authorNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>2008-05-14 06:37:36 +0200
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2008-05-14 10:05:18 -0700
commit362a61ad61199e19a61b8e432015e2586b288f5b (patch)
treeb766e454928eea0db1ec6e301340c27ef5f5244f /mm
parent73f10281ea96d7e8b4fc1c5d755a7c8eb484155b (diff)
fix SMP data race in pagetable setup vs walking
There is a possible data race in the page table walking code. After the split ptlock patches, it actually seems to have been introduced to the core code, but even before that I think it would have impacted some architectures (powerpc and sparc64, at least, walk the page tables without taking locks eg. see find_linux_pte()). The race is as follows: The pte page is allocated, zeroed, and its struct page gets its spinlock initialized. The mm-wide ptl is then taken, and then the pte page is inserted into the pagetables. At this point, the spinlock is not guaranteed to have ordered the previous stores to initialize the pte page with the subsequent store to put it in the page tables. So another Linux page table walker might be walking down (without any locks, because we have split-leaf-ptls), and find that new pte we've inserted. It might try to take the spinlock before the store from the other CPU initializes it. And subsequently it might read a pte_t out before stores from the other CPU have cleared the memory. There are also similar races in higher levels of the page tables. They obviously don't involve the spinlock, but could see uninitialized memory. Arch code and hardware pagetable walkers that walk the pagetables without locks could see similar uninitialized memory problems, regardless of whether split ptes are enabled or not. I prefer to put the barriers in core code, because that's where the higher level logic happens, but the page table accessors are per-arch, and open-coding them everywhere I don't think is an option. I'll put the read-side barriers in alpha arch code for now (other architectures perform data-dependent loads in order). Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm')
-rw-r--r--mm/memory.c21
1 files changed, 21 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/mm/memory.c b/mm/memory.c
index 48c122d42ed..fb5608a120e 100644
--- a/mm/memory.c
+++ b/mm/memory.c
@@ -311,6 +311,21 @@ int __pte_alloc(struct mm_struct *mm, pmd_t *pmd, unsigned long address)
if (!new)
return -ENOMEM;
+ /*
+ * Ensure all pte setup (eg. pte page lock and page clearing) are
+ * visible before the pte is made visible to other CPUs by being
+ * put into page tables.
+ *
+ * The other side of the story is the pointer chasing in the page
+ * table walking code (when walking the page table without locking;
+ * ie. most of the time). Fortunately, these data accesses consist
+ * of a chain of data-dependent loads, meaning most CPUs (alpha
+ * being the notable exception) will already guarantee loads are
+ * seen in-order. See the alpha page table accessors for the
+ * smp_read_barrier_depends() barriers in page table walking code.
+ */
+ smp_wmb(); /* Could be smp_wmb__xxx(before|after)_spin_lock */
+
spin_lock(&mm->page_table_lock);
if (!pmd_present(*pmd)) { /* Has another populated it ? */
mm->nr_ptes++;
@@ -329,6 +344,8 @@ int __pte_alloc_kernel(pmd_t *pmd, unsigned long address)
if (!new)
return -ENOMEM;
+ smp_wmb(); /* See comment in __pte_alloc */
+
spin_lock(&init_mm.page_table_lock);
if (!pmd_present(*pmd)) { /* Has another populated it ? */
pmd_populate_kernel(&init_mm, pmd, new);
@@ -2619,6 +2636,8 @@ int __pud_alloc(struct mm_struct *mm, pgd_t *pgd, unsigned long address)
if (!new)
return -ENOMEM;
+ smp_wmb(); /* See comment in __pte_alloc */
+
spin_lock(&mm->page_table_lock);
if (pgd_present(*pgd)) /* Another has populated it */
pud_free(mm, new);
@@ -2640,6 +2659,8 @@ int __pmd_alloc(struct mm_struct *mm, pud_t *pud, unsigned long address)
if (!new)
return -ENOMEM;
+ smp_wmb(); /* See comment in __pte_alloc */
+
spin_lock(&mm->page_table_lock);
#ifndef __ARCH_HAS_4LEVEL_HACK
if (pud_present(*pud)) /* Another has populated it */