There is a possible data race in the page table walking code. After the split
ptlock patches, it actually seems to have been introduced to the core code, but
even before that I think it would have impacted some architectures (powerpc
and sparc64, at least, walk the page tables without taking locks eg. see
find_linux_pte()).
The race is as follows:
The pte page is allocated, zeroed, and its struct page gets its spinlock
initialized. The mm-wide ptl is then taken, and then the pte page is inserted
into the pagetables.
At this point, the spinlock is not guaranteed to have ordered the previous
stores to initialize the pte page with the subsequent store to put it in the
page tables. So another Linux page table walker might be walking down (without
any locks, because we have split-leaf-ptls), and find that new pte we've
inserted. It might try to take the spinlock before the store from the other
CPU initializes it. And subsequently it might read a pte_t out before stores
from the other CPU have cleared the memory.
There are also similar races in higher levels of the page tables. They
obviously don't involve the spinlock, but could see uninitialized memory.
Arch code and hardware pagetable walkers that walk the pagetables without
locks could see similar uninitialized memory problems, regardless of whether
split ptes are enabled or not.
I prefer to put the barriers in core code, because that's where the higher
level logic happens, but the page table accessors are per-arch, and open-coding
them everywhere I don't think is an option. I'll put the read-side barriers
in alpha arch code for now (other architectures perform data-dependent loads
in order).
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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