Patch "arm64: mm: Use READ_ONCE when dereferencing pointer to pte table" has been added to the 4.13-stable tree

This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled

arm64: mm: Use READ_ONCE when dereferencing pointer to pte table

to the 4.13-stable tree which can be found at:
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary

The filename of the patch is:
arm64-mm-use-read_once-when-dereferencing-pointer-to-pte-table.patch
and it can be found in the queue-4.13 subdirectory.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <[email protected]> know about it.

From: Will Deacon <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2017 11:29:55 +0100
Subject: arm64: mm: Use READ_ONCE when dereferencing pointer to pte table

From: Will Deacon <[email protected]>

commit f069faba688701c4d56b6c3452a130f97bf02e95 upstream.

On kernels built with support for transparent huge pages, different CPUs can access the PMD concurrently due to e.g. fast GUP or page_vma_mapped_walk and they must take care to use READ_ONCE to avoid value tearing or caching of stale values by the compiler. Unfortunately, these functions call into our pgtable macros, which don't use READ_ONCE, and compiler caching has been observed to cause the following crash during ext4 writeback:

PC is at check_pte+0x20/0x170
LR is at page_vma_mapped_walk+0x2e0/0x540
[...]
Process doio (pid: 2463, stack limit = 0xffff00000f2e8000)

Call trace:
[<ffff000008233328>] check_pte+0x20/0x170
[<ffff000008233758>] page_vma_mapped_walk+0x2e0/0x540
[<ffff000008234adc>] page_mkclean_one+0xac/0x278
[<ffff000008234d98>] rmap_walk_file+0xf0/0x238
[<ffff000008236e74>] rmap_walk+0x64/0xa0
[<ffff0000082370c8>] page_mkclean+0x90/0xa8
[<ffff0000081f3c64>] clear_page_dirty_for_io+0x84/0x2a8
[<ffff00000832f984>] mpage_submit_page+0x34/0x98
[<ffff00000832fb4c>] mpage_process_page_bufs+0x164/0x170
[<ffff00000832fc8c>] mpage_prepare_extent_to_map+0x134/0x2b8
[<ffff00000833530c>] ext4_writepages+0x484/0xe30
[<ffff0000081f6ab4>] do_writepages+0x44/0xe8
[<ffff0000081e5bd4>] __filemap_fdatawrite_range+0xbc/0x110
[<ffff0000081e5e68>] file_write_and_wait_range+0x48/0xd8
[<ffff000008324310>] ext4_sync_file+0x80/0x4b8
[<ffff0000082bd434>] vfs_fsync_range+0x64/0xc0
[<ffff0000082332b4>] SyS_msync+0x194/0x1e8

This is because page_vma_mapped_walk loads the PMD twice before calling
pte_offset_map: the first time without READ_ONCE (where it gets all zeroes due to a concurrent pmdp_invalidate) and the second time with READ_ONCE (where it sees a valid table pointer due to a concurrent pmd_populate). However, the compiler inlines everything and caches the first value in a register, which is subsequently used in pte_offset_phys which returns a junk pointer that is later dereferenced when attempting to access the relevant pte.

This patch fixes the issue by using READ_ONCE in pte_offset_phys to ensure that a stale value is not used. Whilst this is a point fix for a known failure (and simple to backport), a full fix moving all of our page table accessors over to {READ,WRITE}_ONCE and consistently using READ_ONCE in page_vma_mapped_walk is in the works for a future kernel release.

---
 arch/arm64/include/asm/pgtable.h |    2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

@@ -412,7 +412,7 @@ static inline phys_addr_t pmd_page_paddr
 /* Find an entry in the third-level page table. */
 #define pte_index(addr)		(((addr) >> PAGE_SHIFT) & (PTRS_PER_PTE - 1))
 
-#define pte_offset_phys(dir,addr)	(pmd_page_paddr(*(dir)) + pte_index(addr) * sizeof(pte_t))
+#define pte_offset_phys(dir,addr)	(pmd_page_paddr(READ_ONCE(*(dir))) + pte_index(addr) * sizeof(pte_t))
 #define pte_offset_kernel(dir,addr)	((pte_t *)__va(pte_offset_phys((dir), (addr))))
 
 #define pte_offset_map(dir,addr)	pte_offset_kernel((dir), (addr))

Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from [email protected] are

queue-4.13/arm64-fault-route-pte-translation-faults-via-do_translation_fault.patch queue-4.13/arm64-mm-use-read_once-when-dereferencing-pointer-to-pte-table.patch queue-4.13/arm64-make-sure-spsel-is-always-set.patch