Re: UIO: munmap bug for boot time allocated memory

[Hans J. Koch]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 05:17:17PM +1000, Peter Crosthwaite wrote:
> Hi Greg,
> 
> Thanks for your reply on the mmunmap issue. Sorry about the delay on
> this correspondance.
> 
> I have looked into this bug in more detail. The
> alloc_bootmem_low_pages() call is falling back to a call to kzalloc(),
> so the address passed to UIO when used in UIO_MEM_LOGICAL is a return
> from kmalloc(). So my first question is, is kmalloc'ed memory
> supported by UIO?

Yes, of course. UIO_MEM_LOGICAL is the correct memtype for that. But
that applies only to memory you get _directly_ from kmalloc().
For example, dma_alloc_coherent() on ARM internally gets its memory from
kmalloc, too. But it needs a completely different mapping routine,
trying to map it using UIO_MEM_LOGICAL will fail.

> 
> With regards to the copying the data from the buffer to file, yes it
> is showing the correct data.
> 
> I have since resolved the BUG() by manually modifying the usage
> counters for the buffer pages from kernel space. i.e. Once the memory
> is kmalloc'ed the driver will iterate through all the pages and
> increment the _count field of the struct page. This will cause the
> pages to have a user count of 2 when mmaped (by user space) which
> reverts to 1 when unmapped. Now this fixes the bug, but should this
> manual increment be necessary? Is there a cleaner way in the kernel
> API for kernel space to mark itself as a user of a memory range or
> user space VMA?
> 
> You mentioned linking you up with the source code for my driver. Im
> trying to put together a minimal driver that replicates this bug, but
> it seems UIO enforces the need for a parent device when initialised.
> Considering this bug requires no actual hardware to replicate, is
> there a way to get a UIO device without a physical device to be able
> to test this behaviour in isolation?

There once was the uio_dummy driver. It maps some kmalloc'ed memory
to userspace and uses a timer to simulate interrupts. Just google
for "uio_dummy" and you'll find it. It's quite old (2.6.23), so it
will need some fixing. But it should give you the idea.

Thanks,
Hans
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