Re: [PATCH] rdma: don't make pages writeable if not requiested

From: Michael S. Tsirkin
Date: Thu Mar 21 2013 - 15:15:29 EST


On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:41:35PM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 08:16:33PM +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>
> > This is the one I find redundant. Since the write will be done by
> > the adaptor under direct control by the application, why does it
> > make sense to declare this beforehand? If you don't want to allow
> > local write access to memory, just do not post any receive WRs with
> > this address. If you posted and regret it, reset the QP to cancel.
>
> This is to support your COW scenario - the app declares before hand to
> the kernel that it will write to the memory and the kernel ensures
> pages are dedicated to the app at registration time. Or the app says
> it will only read and the kernel could leave them shared.

Someone here is confused. LOCAL_WRITE/absence of it does not address
COW, it breaks COW anyway. Are you now saying we should change rdma so
without LOCAL_WRITE it will not break COW?

> The adaptor enforces the access control to prevent a naughty app from
> writing to shared memory - think about mmap'ing libc.so and then using
> RDMA to write to the shared pages. It is necessary to ensure that is
> impossible.
>
> Jason

That's why it's redundant: we can't trust an application to tell us
'this page is writeable', we must get this info from kernel. And so
there's apparently no need for application to tell adaptor about
LOCAL_WRITE.

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MST
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