> I probably chose the wrong name for this feature (write rarely). > That's _usually_ true, but "sensitive_write()" was getting rather > long. The things that we need to protect with this are certainly stuff > that doesn't get much writing, but some things are just plain > sensitive (like page tables) and we should still try to be as fast as > possible with them.
Not too late to rename it. Scoped write? I think it makes change to use a different API than PaX for portability too, but not a different x86 implementation. It's quite important to limit the writes to the calling thread and it needs to perform well to be introduced widely. > I'm all for a general case for the infrastructure (as Andy and Mark > has mentioned), but I don't want to get into the situation where > people start refusing to use it because it's "too slow" (for example, > see refcount_t vs net-dev right now). Meanwhile, the PaX implementation has improved to avoid the issues that were brought up while only introducing a single always-predicted (due to code placement) branch on the overflow flag. That seems to have gone unnoticed upstream, where there's now a much slower implementation that's not more secure, and is blocked from introduction in areas where it's most needed based on the performance. Not to mention that it's opt-in... which is never going to work.
