[v4,0/2] Avoid memory corruption caused by per-VMA locks

Message

Suren Baghdasaryan July 6, 2023, 1:13 a.m. UTC

A memory corruption was reported in [1] with bisection pointing to the
patch [2] enabling per-VMA locks for x86. Based on the reproducer
provided in [1] we suspect this is caused by the lack of VMA locking
while forking a child process.

Patch 1/2 in the series implements proper VMA locking during fork.
I tested the fix locally using the reproducer and was unable to reproduce
the memory corruption problem.
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 ~7% 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.

Patch 2/2 disables per-VMA locks until the fix is tested and verified.

Both patches apply cleanly over Linus' ToT and stable 6.4.y branch.

Changes from v3 posted at [3]:
- Replace vma_iter_init with vma_iter_set, per Liam R. Howlett
- Update the regression number caused by additional VMA tree walk

[1] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217624
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/[e-mail]
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/all/[e-mail]

Suren Baghdasaryan (2):
  fork: lock VMAs of the parent process when forking
  mm: disable CONFIG_PER_VMA_LOCK until its fixed

 kernel/fork.c | 6 ++++++
 mm/Kconfig    | 3 ++-
 2 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)