mm: fix fault vs invalidate race for linear mappings

Fix the race between invalidate_inode_pages and do_no_page.

Andrea Arcangeli identified a subtle race between invalidation of pages from
pagecache with userspace mappings, and do_no_page.

The issue is that invalidation has to shoot down all mappings to the page,
before it can be discarded from the pagecache.  Between shooting down ptes to
a particular page, and actually dropping the struct page from the pagecache,
do_no_page from any process might fault on that page and establish a new
mapping to the page just before it gets discarded from the pagecache.

The most common case where such invalidation is used is in file truncation.
This case was catered for by doing a sort of open-coded seqlock between the
file's i_size, and its truncate_count.

Truncation will decrease i_size, then increment truncate_count before
unmapping userspace pages; do_no_page will read truncate_count, then find the
page if it is within i_size, and then check truncate_count under the page
table lock and back out and retry if it had subsequently been changed (ptl
will serialise against unmapping, and ensure a potentially updated
truncate_count is actually visible).

Complexity and documentation issues aside, the locking protocol fails in the
case where we would like to invalidate pagecache inside i_size.  do_no_page
can come in anytime and filemap_nopage is not aware of the invalidation in
progress (as it is when it is outside i_size).  The end result is that
dangling (->mapping == NULL) pages that appear to be from a particular file
may be mapped into userspace with nonsense data.  Valid mappings to the same
place will see a different page.

Andrea implemented two working fixes, one using a real seqlock, another using
a page->flags bit.  He also proposed using the page lock in do_no_page, but
that was initially considered too heavyweight.  However, it is not a global or
per-file lock, and the page cacheline is modified in do_no_page to increment
_count and _mapcount anyway, so a further modification should not be a large
performance hit.  Scalability is not an issue.

This patch implements this latter approach.  ->nopage implementations return
with the page locked if it is possible for their underlying file to be
invalidated (in that case, they must set a special vm_flags bit to indicate
so).  do_no_page only unlocks the page after setting up the mapping
completely.  invalidation is excluded because it holds the page lock during
invalidation of each page (and ensures that the page is not mapped while
holding the lock).

This also allows significant simplifications in do_no_page, because we have
the page locked in the right place in the pagecache from the start.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mm.h b/include/linux/mm.h
index a5c451816fdc..ca9536a348c8 100644
--- a/include/linux/mm.h
+++ b/include/linux/mm.h
@@ -168,6 +168,12 @@ extern unsigned int kobjsize(const void *objp);
 #define VM_INSERTPAGE   0x02000000      /* The vma has had "vm_insert_page()" done on it */
 #define VM_ALWAYSDUMP   0x04000000      /* Always include in core dumps */
 
+#define VM_CAN_INVALIDATE 0x08000000    /* The mapping may be invalidated,
+                                         * eg. truncate or invalidate_inode_*.
+                                         * In this case, do_no_page must
+                                         * return with the page locked.
+                                         */
+
 #ifndef VM_STACK_DEFAULT_FLAGS          /* arch can override this */
 #define VM_STACK_DEFAULT_FLAGS VM_DATA_DEFAULT_FLAGS
 #endif