[PATCH] mm: Check we have the right vma in __access_remote_vm()
Michael Ellerman
michael at ellerman.id.au
Tue Apr 12 10:34:17 EST 2011
On Mon, 2011-04-11 at 16:50 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Apr 2011 17:24:01 +1000 (EST)
> Michael Ellerman <michael at ellerman.id.au> wrote:
>
> > In __access_remote_vm() we need to check that we have found the right
> > vma, not the following vma, before we try to access it. Otherwise we
> > might call the vma's access routine with an address which does not
> > fall inside the vma.
> >
>
> hm, mysteries. Does this patch fix any known problem in any known
> kernel, or was the problem discovered by inspection, or what?
Sorry I meant to add that explanation but forgot.
It was discovered on a current kernel but with an unreleased driver,
from memory it was strace leading to a kernel bad access, but it
obviously depends on what the access implementation does.
Looking at other access implementations I only see:
$ git grep -A 5 vm_operations|grep access
arch/powerpc/platforms/cell/spufs/file.c- .access = spufs_mem_mmap_access,
arch/x86/pci/i386.c- .access = generic_access_phys,
drivers/char/mem.c- .access = generic_access_phys
fs/sysfs/bin.c- .access = bin_access,
The spufs one looks like it might behave badly given the wrong vma, it
assumes vma->vm_file->private_data is a spu_context, and looks like it
would probably blow up pretty quickly if it wasn't.
generic_access_phys() only uses the vma to check vm_flags and get the
mm, and then walks page tables using the address. So it should bail on
the vm_flags check, or at worst let you access some other VM_IO mapping.
And bin_access() just proxies to another access implementation.
cheers
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