Reading and modifying current->mm and current->active_mm and switching mm should be done with irqs off, to prevent races seeing an intermediate state. This is similar to commit 38cf307c1f20 ("mm: fix kthread_use_mm() vs TLB invalidate"). At exec-time when the new mm is activated, the old one should usually be single-threaded and no longer used, unless something else is holding an mm_users reference (which may be possible). Absent other mm_users, there is also a race with preemption and lazy tlb switching. Consider the kernel_execve case where the current thread is using a lazy tlb active mm: call_usermodehelper() kernel_execve() old_mm = current->mm; active_mm = current->active_mm; *** preempt *** --------------------> schedule() prev->active_mm = NULL; mmdrop(prev active_mm); ... <-------------------- schedule() current->mm = mm; current->active_mm = mm; if (!old_mm) mmdrop(active_mm); If we switch back to the kernel thread from a different mm, there is a double free of the old active_mm, and a missing free of the new one. Closing this race only requires interrupts to be disabled while ->mm and ->active_mm are being switched, but the TLB problem requires also holding interrupts off over activate_mm. Unfortunately not all archs can do that yet, e.g., arm defers the switch if irqs are disabled and expects finish_arch_post_lock_switch() to be called to complete the flush; um takes a blocking lock in activate_mm(). So as a first step, disable interrupts across the mm/active_mm updates to close the lazy tlb preempt race, and provide an arch option to extend that to activate_mm which allows architectures doing IPI based TLB shootdowns to close the second race. This is a bit ugly, but in the interest of fixing the bug and backporting before all architectures are converted this is a compromise. Signed-off-by: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200914045219.3736466-2-npiggin@gmail.com
Linux kernel ============ There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/ There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.
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