On Wed, 8 Mar 2017, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Adding x86 people too, since this seems to be something off about
> ARCH_HAS_SET_MEMORY for x86-32.
>
> The code seems to be shared between x86-32 and 64, I'm not seeing why
> set_memory_r[ow]() should fail on one but not the other.
Indeed.
> Considering that it seems to be flaky even on 32-bit, maybe it's
> timing-related, or possibly related to TLB sizes or whatever (ie more
> likely hidden by a larger TLB on more modern hardware?)
The only difference I can see is the way how __tlb_flush_all() is
happening. We have 3 variants:
invpcid_flush_all() - depends on X86_FEATURE_INVPCID and X86_FEATURE_PGE
cr4 based flush - depends on X86_FEATURE_PGE
cr3 based flush
No idea which variant is used in that failure case.
> Anyway, just looking at change_page_attr_set_clr(), I notice that the
> page alias checking treats NX specially:
>
> /* No alias checking for _NX bit modifications */
> checkalias = (pgprot_val(mask_set) | pgprot_val(mask_clr)) !=
> _PAGE_NX;
>
> which seems insane. Why would NX be different from other protection
> bits (like _PAGE_RW)?
The reason is that the alias mapping should never be executable at all.
Thanks,
tglx
