Commit 3afe9f84 authored Apr 07, 2015 by Linus Torvalds

Copy the kernel module data from user space in chunks



Unlike most (all?) other copies from user space, kernel module loading
is almost unlimited in size.  So we do a potentially huge
"copy_from_user()" when we copy the module data from user space to the
kernel buffer, which can be a latency concern when preemption is
disabled (or voluntary).

Also, because 'copy_from_user()' clears the tail of the kernel buffer on
failures, even a *failed* copy can end up wasting a lot of time.

Normally neither of these are concerns in real life, but they do trigger
when doing stress-testing with trinity.  Running in a VM seems to add
its own overheadm causing trinity module load testing to even trigger
the watchdog.

The simple fix is to just chunk up the module loading, so that it never
tries to copy insanely big areas in one go.  That bounds the latency,
and also the amount of (unnecessarily, in this case) cleared memory for
the failure case.

Reported-by: Sasha Levin <sasha.levin@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

parent cae2a173

kernel/module.c

+18 −1

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -2479,6 +2479,23 @@ static int elf_header_check(struct load_info *info)
		return 0;
		}

		#define COPY_CHUNK_SIZE (16*PAGE_SIZE)

		static int copy_chunked_from_user(void dst, const void __user usrc, unsigned long len)
		{
		do {
		unsigned long n = min(len, COPY_CHUNK_SIZE);

		if (copy_from_user(dst, usrc, n) != 0)
		return -EFAULT;
		cond_resched();
		dst += n;
		usrc += n;
		len -= n;
		} while (len);
		return 0;
		}

		/* Sets info->hdr and info->len. */
		static int copy_module_from_user(const void __user *umod, unsigned long len,
		struct load_info *info)
		@@ -2498,7 +2515,7 @@ static int copy_module_from_user(const void __user *umod, unsigned long len,
		if (!info->hdr)
		return -ENOMEM;

		if (copy_from_user(info->hdr, umod, info->len) != 0) {
		if (copy_chunked_from_user(info->hdr, umod, info->len) != 0) {
		vfree(info->hdr);
		return -EFAULT;
		}

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