In reaction to a proposal to introduce a memcpy_mcsafe_fast()
implementation Linus points out that memcpy_mcsafe() is poorly named
relative to communicating the scope of the interface. Specifically what
addresses are valid to pass as source, destination, and what faults /
exceptions are handled.
Of particular concern is that even though x86 might be able to handle
the semantics of copy_mc_to_user() with its common copy_user_generic()
implementation other archs likely need / want an explicit path for this
case:
On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 11:28 AM Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 6:21 PM Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > However now I see that copy_user_generic() works for the wrong reason.
> > It works because the exception on the source address due to poison
> > looks no different than a write fault on the user address to the
> > caller, it's still just a short copy. So it makes copy_to_user() work
> > for the wrong reason relative to the name.
>
> Right.
>
> And it won't work that way on other architectures. On x86, we have a
> generic function that can take faults on either side, and we use it
> for both cases (and for the "in_user" case too), but that's an
> artifact of the architecture oddity.
>
> In fact, it's probably wrong even on x86 - because it can hide bugs -
> but writing those things is painful enough that everybody prefers
> having just one function.
Replace a single top-level memcpy_mcsafe() with either
copy_mc_to_user(), or copy_mc_to_kernel().
Introduce an x86 copy_mc_fragile() name as the rename for the
low-level x86 implementation formerly named memcpy_mcsafe(). It is used
as the slow / careful backend that is supplanted by a fast
copy_mc_generic() in a follow-on patch.
One side-effect of this reorganization is that separating copy_mc_64.S
to its own file means that perf no longer needs to track dependencies
for its memcpy_64.S benchmarks.
[ bp: Massage a bit. ]
Signed-off-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Acked-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Link: http://lore.kernel.org/r/CAHk-=wjSqtXAqfUJxFtWNwmguFASTgB0dz1dT3V-78Quiezqbg@mail.gmail.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/160195561680.2163339.11574962055305783722.stgit@dwillia2-desk3.amr.corp.intel.com
Dan Williams