When forking a child process, parent write-protects an anonymous page and COW-shares it with the child being forked using copy_present_pte(). Parent's TLB is flushed right before we drop the parent's mmap_lock in dup_mmap(). If we get a write-fault before that TLB flush in the parent, and we end up replacing that anonymous page in the parent process in do_wp_page() (because, COW-shared with the child), this might lead to some stale writable TLB entries targeting the wrong (old) page. Similar issue happened in the past with userfaultfd (see flush_tlb_page() call inside do_wp_page()). Lock VMAs of the parent process when forking a child, which prevents concurrent page faults during fork operation and avoids this issue. This fix can potentially regress some fork-heavy workloads. Kernel build time did not show noticeable regression on a 56-core machine while a stress test mapping 10000 VMAs and forking 5000 times in a tight loop shows ~5% regression. If such fork time regression is unacceptable, disabling CONFIG_PER_VMA_LOCK should restore its performance. Further optimizations are possible if this regression proves to be problematic.
Suggested-by: David Hildenbrand david@redhat.com Reported-by: Jiri Slaby jirislaby@kernel.org Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/all/dbdef34c-3a07-5951-e1ae-e9c6e3cdf51b@kernel.org/ Reported-by: Holger Hoffstätte holger@applied-asynchrony.com Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/all/b198d649-f4bf-b971-31d0-e8433ec2a34c@applied-asy... Reported-by: Jacob Young jacobly.alt@gmail.com Closes: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217624 Fixes: 0bff0aaea03e ("x86/mm: try VMA lock-based page fault handling first") Signed-off-by: Suren Baghdasaryan surenb@google.com --- kernel/fork.c | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
diff --git a/kernel/fork.c b/kernel/fork.c index b85814e614a5..d2e12b6d2b18 100644 --- a/kernel/fork.c +++ b/kernel/fork.c @@ -686,6 +686,7 @@ static __latent_entropy int dup_mmap(struct mm_struct *mm, for_each_vma(old_vmi, mpnt) { struct file *file;
+ vma_start_write(mpnt); if (mpnt->vm_flags & VM_DONTCOPY) { vm_stat_account(mm, mpnt->vm_flags, -vma_pages(mpnt)); continue;