Commit 07a66d7c authored Feb 20, 2009 by Ingo Molnar

x86: use the right protections for split-up pagetables



Steven Rostedt found a bug in where in his modified kernel
ftrace was unable to modify the kernel text, due to the PMD
itself having been marked read-only as well in
split_large_page().

The fix, suggested by Linus, is to not try to 'clone' the
reference protection of a huge-page, but to use the standard
(and permissive) page protection bits of KERNPG_TABLE.

The 'cloning' makes sense for the ptes but it's a confused and
incorrect concept at the page table level - because the
pagetable entry is a set of all ptes and hence cannot
'clone' any single protection attribute - the ptes can be any
mixture of protections.

With the permissive KERNPG_TABLE, even if the pte protections
get changed after this point (due to ftrace doing code-patching
or other similar activities like kprobes), the resulting combined
protections will still be correct and the pte's restrictive
(or permissive) protections will control it.

Also update the comment.

This bug was there for a long time but has not caused visible
problems before as it needs a rather large read-only area to
trigger. Steve possibly hacked his kernel with some really
large arrays or so. Anyway, the bug is definitely worth fixing.

[ Huang Ying also experienced problems in this area when writing
  the EFI code, but the real bug in split_large_page() was not
  realized back then. ]

Reported-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Reported-by: Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com>
Acked-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

parent 48ffc70b

arch/x86/mm/pageattr.c

+5 −10

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -508,18 +508,13 @@ static int split_large_page(pte_t *kpte, unsigned long address)
		#endif

		/*
		* Install the new, split up pagetable. Important details here:
		* Install the new, split up pagetable.
		*
		* On Intel the NX bit of all levels must be cleared to make a
		* page executable. See section 4.13.2 of Intel 64 and IA-32
		* Architectures Software Developer's Manual).
		*
		* Mark the entry present. The current mapping might be
		* set to not present, which we preserved above.
		* We use the standard kernel pagetable protections for the new
		* pagetable protections, the actual ptes set above control the
		* primary protection behavior:
		*/
		ref_prot = pte_pgprot(pte_mkexec(pte_clrhuge(*kpte)));
		pgprot_val(ref_prot) \|= _PAGE_PRESENT;
		__set_pmd_pte(kpte, address, mk_pte(base, ref_prot));
		__set_pmd_pte(kpte, address, mk_pte(base, __pgprot(_KERNPG_TABLE)));
		base = NULL;

		out_unlock:

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