Skip to content
  • Peter Feiner's avatar
    mm: softdirty: enable write notifications on VMAs after VM_SOFTDIRTY cleared · 64e45507
    Peter Feiner authored
    For VMAs that don't want write notifications, PTEs created for read faults
    have their write bit set.  If the read fault happens after VM_SOFTDIRTY is
    cleared, then the PTE's softdirty bit will remain clear after subsequent
    writes.
    
    Here's a simple code snippet to demonstrate the bug:
    
      char* m = mmap(NULL, getpagesize(), PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE,
                     MAP_ANONYMOUS | MAP_SHARED, -1, 0);
      system("echo 4 > /proc/$PPID/clear_refs"); /* clear VM_SOFTDIRTY */
      assert(*m == '\0');     /* new PTE allows write access */
      assert(!soft_dirty(x));
      *m = 'x';               /* should dirty the page */
      assert(soft_dirty(x));  /* fails */
    
    With this patch, write notifications are enabled when VM_SOFTDIRTY is
    cleared.  Furthermore, to avoid unnecessary faults, write notifications
    are disabled when VM_SOFTDIRTY is set.
    
    As a side effect of enabling and disabling write notifications with
    care, this patch fixes a bug in mprotect where vm_page_prot bits set by
    drivers were zapped on mprotect.  An analogous bug was fixed in mmap by
    commit c9d0bf24
    
     ("mm: uncached vma support with writenotify").
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Feiner <pfeiner@google.com>
    Reported-by: default avatarPeter Feiner <pfeiner@google.com>
    Suggested-by: default avatarKirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@openvz.org>
    Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
    Cc: Jamie Liu <jamieliu@google.com>
    Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>
    Cc: Bjorn Helgaas <bhelgaas@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    64e45507