Re: [bugfix] try_to_unmap_cluster() passes out-of-bounds pte to pte_unmap()

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Hugh Dickins wrote:
> On Mon, 23 May 2005, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>
> > On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 05:14:06PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> > > I must say that I continue to find this approach a bit queazifying.
> > > After some reading of the code I'd agree that yes, it's not possible for us
> > > to get here with `pte' pointing at the first slot of the pte page, but it's
> > > not 100% obvious and it's possible that someone will come along later and
> > > will change things in try_to_unmap_cluster() which cause this unmap to
> > > suddenly do the wrong thing in rare circumstances.
> > > IOW: I'd sleep better at night if we took a temporary and actually unmapped
> > > the thing which we we got back from pte_offset_map()..  Am I being silly?
>
>
> There's a similar argument for queasiness in all the other (8 or more)
> instances of the idiom.  I think we originally adopted (and I furthered)
> this pte_unmap(pte - 1) idiom because in the majority of architecture's
> configurations pte_unmap does nothing at all, so we resented assigning
> a pointless variable in some critical loops.

Still, the compiler should be able to eliminate that extra register
as well as it can eliminate the intermediate (pte - 1) result (that
is to say, I hope perfectly in this day and age).

It may be more of an issue with architectures that actually *do* do
something in pte_unmap, in which case perhaps you increase the
register pressure over the critical loop? I guess we can just laugh
at them.

> > Not at all. I merely attempt to minimize diffsize by default. An
> > alternative implementation follows (changelog etc. to be taken
> > from the prior patch) in case it saves the time (however short) needed
> > to write it yourself.
>
>
> Either of wli's patches is fine with me.  There are several levels on
> which try_to_unmap_cluster is harder to understand than the others,
> and no good reason to resist the variable assignment.
>
> We could rewrite pte_unmap to avoid the issue completely, since its
> job is to unmap (or pretend to unmap) KM_PTE0's pte if the address
> is in the fixmap area: but changing it to tolerate an off-by-one
> address gives a queasy feeling too.

Looks like no architecture (other than maybe frv?) even uses the
kvaddr argument to kunmap_atomic unless HIGHMEM_DEBUG/DEBUG_HIGHMEM
is enabled. If you stored that info elsewhere, you wouldn't even
need to pass the argument in.

But hmm... I don't see anyone getting motivated enough to rewrite the
debug code over this issue :)

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

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