• Christian Brauner's avatar
    file: convert to SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU · 0ede61d8
    Christian Brauner authored
    In recent discussions around some performance improvements in the file
    handling area we discussed switching the file cache to rely on
    SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU which allows us to get rid of call_rcu() based
    freeing for files completely. This is a pretty sensitive change overall
    but it might actually be worth doing.
    
    The main downside is the subtlety. The other one is that we should
    really wait for Jann's patch to land that enables KASAN to handle
    SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU UAFs. Currently it doesn't but a patch for this
    exists.
    
    With SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU objects may be freed and reused multiple times
    which requires a few changes. So it isn't sufficient anymore to just
    acquire a reference to the file in question under rcu using
    atomic_long_inc_not_zero() since the file might have already been
    recycled and someone else might have bumped the reference.
    
    In other words, callers might see reference count bumps from newer
    users. For this reason it is necessary to verify that the pointer is the
    same before and after the reference count increment. This pattern can be
    seen in get_file_rcu() and __files_get_rcu().
    
    In addition, it isn't possible to access or check fields in struct file
    without first aqcuiring a reference on it. Not doing that was always
    very dodgy and it was only usable for non-pointer data in struct file.
    With SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU it is necessary that callers first acquire a
    reference under rcu or they must hold the files_lock of the fdtable.
    Failing to do either one of this is a bug.
    
    Thanks to Jann for pointing out that we need to ensure memory ordering
    between reallocations and pointer check by ensuring that all subsequent
    loads have a dependency on the second load in get_file_rcu() and
    providing a fixup that was folded into this patch.
    
    Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
    Suggested-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarChristian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
    0ede61d8
fd.c 8.99 KB