• Atsushi Nemoto's avatar
    [PATCH] Fix COW D-cache aliasing on fork · 77fff4ae
    Atsushi Nemoto authored
    Problem:
    
    1. There is a process containing two thread (T1 and T2).  The
       thread T1 calls fork().  Then dup_mmap() function called on T1 context.
    
    static inline int dup_mmap(struct mm_struct *mm, struct mm_struct *oldmm)
    	...
    	flush_cache_mm(current->mm);
    	...	/* A */
    	(write-protect all Copy-On-Write pages)
    	...	/* B */
    	flush_tlb_mm(current->mm);
    	...
    
    2. When preemption happens between A and B (or on SMP kernel), the
       thread T2 can run and modify data on COW pages without page fault
       (modified data will stay in cache).
    
    3. Some time after fork() completed, the thread T2 may cause a page
       fault by write-protect on a COW page.
    
    4. Then data of the COW page will be copied to newly allocated
       physical page (copy_cow_page()).  It reads data via kernel mapping.
       The kernel mapping can have different 'color' with user space
       mapping of the thread T2 (dcache aliasing).  Therefore
       copy_cow_page() will copy stale data.  Then the modified data in
       cache will be lost.
    
    In order to allow architecture code to deal with this problem allow
    architecture code to override copy_user_highpage() by defining
    __HAVE_ARCH_COPY_USER_HIGHPAGE in <asm/page.h>.
    
    The main part of this patch was originally written by Ralf Baechle;
    Atushi Nemoto did the the debugging.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAtsushi Nemoto <anemo@mba.ocn.ne.jp>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRalf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    77fff4ae
highmem.h 2.96 KB