Re: [PATCH v13 0/5] UFFD write-tracking migration/snapshots

[Peter Xu]

Hi, David, Andrey,

On Tue, Feb 09, 2021 at 08:06:58PM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > just stumbled over this, quick question:
> > > 
> > > I recently played with UFFD_WP and notices that write protection is
> > > only effective on pages/ranges that have already pages populated (IOW:
> > > !pte_none() in the kernel).
> > > 
> > > In case memory was never populated (or was discarded using e.g.,
> > > madvice(DONTNEED)), write-protection will be skipped silently and you
> > > won't get WP events for applicable pages.
> > > 
> > > So if someone writes to a yet unpoupulated page ("zero"), you won't
> > > get WP events.
> > > 
> > > I can spot that you do a single uffd_change_protection() on the whole
> > > RAMBlock.
> > > 
> > > How are you handling that scenario, or why don't you have to handle
> > > that scenario?

Good catch..  Indeed I overlooked that as well when reviewing the code.

> > > 
> > Hi David,
> > 
> > I really wonder if such a problem exists.. If we are talking about a
> 
> I immediately ran into this issue with my simplest test cases. :)
> 
> > write to an unpopulated page, we should get first page fault on
> > non-present page and populate it with protection bits from respective vma.
> > For UFFD_WP vma's  page will be populated non-writable. So we'll get
> > another page fault on present but read-only page and go to handle_userfault.

The problem is even if the page is read-only, it does not yet have the uffd-wp
bit set, so it won't really trigger the handle_userfault() path.

> You might have to register also for MISSING faults and place zero pages.

So I think what's missing for live snapshot is indeed to register with both
missing & wp mode.

Then we'll receive two messages: For wp, we do like before.  For missing, we do
UFFDIO_ZEROCOPY and at the same time dump this page as a zero page.

I bet live snapshot didn't encounter this issue simply because normal live
snapshots would still work, especially when there's the guest OS. Say, the
worst case is we could have migrated some zero pages with some random data
filled in along with the snapshot, however all these pages were zero pages and
not used by the guest OS after all, then when we load a snapshot we won't
easily notice either..

Thanks,

-- 
Peter Xu