• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    v4l2: don't fall back to follow_pfn() if pin_user_pages_fast() fails · 6647e76a
    Linus Torvalds authored
    The V4L2_MEMORY_USERPTR interface is long deprecated and shouldn't be
    used (and is discouraged for any modern v4l drivers).  And Seth Jenkins
    points out that the fallback to VM_PFNMAP/VM_IO is fundamentally racy
    and dangerous.
    
    Note that it's not even a case that should trigger, since any normal
    user pointer logic ends up just using the pin_user_pages_fast() call
    that does the proper page reference counting.  That's not the problem
    case, only if you try to use special device mappings do you have any
    issues.
    
    Normally I'd just remove this during the merge window, but since Seth
    pointed out the problem cases, we really want to know as soon as
    possible if there are actually any users of this odd special case of a
    legacy interface.  Neither Hans nor Mauro seem to think that such
    mis-uses of the old legacy interface should exist.  As Mauro says:
    
     "See, V4L2 has actually 4 streaming APIs:
            - Kernel-allocated mmap (usually referred simply as just mmap);
            - USERPTR mmap;
            - read();
            - dmabuf;
    
      The USERPTR is one of the oldest way to use it, coming from V4L
      version 1 times, and by far the least used one"
    
    And Hans chimed in on the USERPTR interface:
    
     "To be honest, I wouldn't mind if it goes away completely, but that's a
      bit of a pipe dream right now"
    
    but while removing this legacy interface entirely may be a pipe dream we
    can at least try to remove the unlikely (and actively broken) case of
    using special device mappings for USERPTR accesses.
    
    This replaces it with a WARN_ONCE() that we can remove once we've
    hopefully confirmed that no actual users exist.
    
    NOTE! Longer term, this means that a 'struct frame_vector' only ever
    contains proper page pointers, and all the games we have with converting
    them to pages can go away (grep for 'frame_vector_to_pages()' and the
    uses of 'vec->is_pfns').  But this is just the first step, to verify
    that this code really is all dead, and do so as quickly as possible.
    Reported-by: default avatarSeth Jenkins <sethjenkins@google.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarHans Verkuil <hverkuil@xs4all.nl>
    Acked-by: default avatarMauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@kernel.org>
    Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
    Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    6647e76a
frame_vector.c 5.31 KB