On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 7:15 PM Suren Baghdasaryan <sur...@google.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 8:56 AM Jann Horn <ja...@google.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 23, 2025 at 12:54 AM Andrii Nakryiko
> > <andrii.nakry...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 10:50 AM Suren Baghdasaryan <sur...@google.com> 
> > > wrote:
> > > > Utilize speculative vma lookup to find and snapshot a vma without
> > > > taking mmap_lock during PROCMAP_QUERY ioctl execution. Concurrent
> > > > address space modifications are detected and the lookup is retried.
> > > > While we take the mmap_lock for reading during such contention, we
> > > > do that momentarily only to record new mm_wr_seq counter.
> > >
> > > PROCMAP_QUERY is an even more obvious candidate for fully lockless
> > > speculation, IMO (because it's more obvious that vma's use is
> > > localized to do_procmap_query(), instead of being spread across
> > > m_start/m_next and m_show as with seq_file approach). We do
> > > rcu_read_lock(), mmap_lock_speculate_try_begin(), query for VMA (no
> > > mmap_read_lock), use that VMA to produce (speculative) output, and
> > > then validate that VMA or mm_struct didn't change with
> > > mmap_lock_speculate_retry(). If it did - retry, if not - we are done.
> > > No need for vma_copy and any gets/puts, no?
> >
> > I really strongly dislike this "fully lockless" approach because it
> > means we get data races all over the place, and it gets hard to reason
> > about what happens especially if we do anything other than reading
> > plain data from the VMA. When reading the implementation of
> > do_procmap_query(), at basically every memory read you'd have to think
> > twice as hard to figure out which fields can be concurrently updated
> > elsewhere and whether the subsequent sequence count recheck can
> > recover from the resulting badness.
> >
> > Just as one example, I think get_vma_name() could (depending on
> > compiler optimizations) crash with a NULL deref if the VMA's ->vm_ops
> > pointer is concurrently changed to &vma_dummy_vm_ops by vma_close()
> > between "if (vma->vm_ops && vma->vm_ops->name)" and
> > "vma->vm_ops->name(vma)". And I think this illustrates how the "fully
> > lockless" approach creates more implicit assumptions about the
> > behavior of core MM code, which could be broken by future changes to
> > MM code.
>
> Yeah, I'll need to re-evaluate such an approach after your review. I
> like having get_stable_vma() to obtain a completely stable version of
> the vma in a localized place and then stop worrying about possible
> races. If implemented correctly, would that be enough to address your
> concern, Jann?

Yes, I think a stable local snapshot of the VMA (where tricky data
races are limited to the VMA snapshotting code) is a good tradeoff.

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