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Lorenzo Stoakes 5dba5cc2e0 mm: introduce VM_MAYBE_GUARD and make visible in /proc/$pid/smaps
Patch series "introduce VM_MAYBE_GUARD and make it sticky", v4.

Currently, guard regions are not visible to users except through
/proc/$pid/pagemap, with no explicit visibility at the VMA level.

This makes the feature less useful, as it isn't entirely apparent which
VMAs may have these entries present, especially when performing actions
which walk through memory regions such as those performed by CRIU.

This series addresses this issue by introducing the VM_MAYBE_GUARD flag
which fulfils this role, updating the smaps logic to display an entry for
these.

The semantics of this flag are that a guard region MAY be present if set
(we cannot be sure, as we can't efficiently track whether an
MADV_GUARD_REMOVE finally removes all the guard regions in a VMA) - but if
not set the VMA definitely does NOT have any guard regions present.

It's problematic to establish this flag without further action, because
that means that VMAs with guard regions in them become non-mergeable with
adjacent VMAs for no especially good reason.

To work around this, this series also introduces the concept of 'sticky'
VMA flags - that is flags which:

a. if set in one VMA and not in another still permit those VMAs to be
   merged (if otherwise compatible).

b. When they are merged, the resultant VMA must have the flag set.

The VMA logic is updated to propagate these flags correctly.

Additionally, VM_MAYBE_GUARD being an explicit VMA flag allows us to solve
an issue with file-backed guard regions - previously these established an
anon_vma object for file-backed mappings solely to have vma_needs_copy()
correctly propagate guard region mappings to child processes.

We introduce a new flag alias VM_COPY_ON_FORK (which currently only
specifies VM_MAYBE_GUARD) and update vma_needs_copy() to check explicitly
for this flag and to copy page tables if it is present, which resolves
this issue.

Additionally, we add the ability for allow-listed VMA flags to be
atomically writable with only mmap/VMA read locks held.

The only flag we allow so far is VM_MAYBE_GUARD, which we carefully ensure
does not cause any races by being allowed to do so.

This allows us to maintain guard region installation as a read-locked
operation and not endure the overhead of obtaining a write lock here.

Finally we introduce extensive VMA userland tests to assert that the
sticky VMA logic behaves correctly as well as guard region self tests to
assert that smaps visibility is correctly implemented.


This patch (of 9):

Currently, if a user needs to determine if guard regions are present in a
range, they have to scan all VMAs (or have knowledge of which ones might
have guard regions).

Since commit 8e2f2aeb8b ("fs/proc/task_mmu: add guard region bit to
pagemap") and the related commit a516403787 ("fs/proc: extend the
PAGEMAP_SCAN ioctl to report guard regions"), users can use either
/proc/$pid/pagemap or the PAGEMAP_SCAN functionality to perform this
operation at a virtual address level.

This is not ideal, and it gives no visibility at a /proc/$pid/smaps level
that guard regions exist in ranges.

This patch remedies the situation by establishing a new VMA flag,
VM_MAYBE_GUARD, to indicate that a VMA may contain guard regions (it is
uncertain because we cannot reasonably determine whether a
MADV_GUARD_REMOVE call has removed all of the guard regions in a VMA, and
additionally VMAs may change across merge/split).

We utilise 0x800 for this flag which makes it available to 32-bit
architectures also, a flag that was previously used by VM_DENYWRITE, which
was removed in commit 8d0920bde5 ("mm: remove VM_DENYWRITE") and hasn't
bee reused yet.

We also update the smaps logic and documentation to identify these VMAs.

Another major use of this functionality is that we can use it to identify
that we ought to copy page tables on fork.

We do not actually implement usage of this flag in mm/madvise.c yet as we
need to allow some VMA flags to be applied atomically under mmap/VMA read
lock in order to avoid the need to acquire a write lock for this purpose.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/cover.1763460113.git.lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/cf8ef821eba29b6c5b5e138fffe95d6dcabdedb9.1763460113.git.lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com
Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Pedro Falcato <pfalcato@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: David Hildenbrand (Red Hat) <david@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Lance Yang <lance.yang@linux.dev>
Cc: Andrei Vagin <avagin@gmail.com>
Cc: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@linux.alibaba.com>
Cc: Barry Song <baohua@kernel.org>
Cc: Dev Jain <dev.jain@arm.com>
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Liam Howlett <liam.howlett@oracle.com>
Cc: "Masami Hiramatsu (Google)" <mhiramat@kernel.org>
Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Mike Rapoport <rppt@kernel.org>
Cc: Nico Pache <npache@redhat.com>
Cc: Ryan Roberts <ryan.roberts@arm.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>
Cc: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
2025-11-20 13:43:58 -08:00
arch mm: make INVALID_PHYS_ADDR a generic macro 2025-11-16 17:28:26 -08:00
block block-6.18-20251031 2025-10-31 12:57:19 -07:00
certs sign-file,extract-cert: use pkcs11 provider for OPENSSL MAJOR >= 3 2024-09-20 19:52:48 +03:00
crypto This push contains the following changes: 2025-10-10 08:56:16 -07:00
Documentation mm: introduce VM_MAYBE_GUARD and make visible in /proc/$pid/smaps 2025-11-20 13:43:58 -08:00
drivers vfio/nvgrace-gpu: register device memory for poison handling 2025-11-16 17:28:30 -08:00
fs mm: introduce VM_MAYBE_GUARD and make visible in /proc/$pid/smaps 2025-11-20 13:43:58 -08:00
include mm: introduce VM_MAYBE_GUARD and make visible in /proc/$pid/smaps 2025-11-20 13:43:58 -08:00
init printk changes for 6.18 2025-10-04 11:13:11 -07:00
io_uring mm: consistently use current->mm in mm_get_unmapped_area() 2025-11-16 17:27:57 -08:00
ipc namespace-6.18-rc1 2025-09-29 11:20:29 -07:00
kernel mm: make INVALID_PHYS_ADDR a generic macro 2025-11-16 17:28:26 -08:00
lib lib/alloc_tag: use %pe format specifier 2025-11-20 13:43:57 -08:00
LICENSES LICENSES: Replace the obsolete address of the FSF in the GFDL-1.2 2025-07-24 11:15:39 +02:00
mm mm: introduce VM_MAYBE_GUARD and make visible in /proc/$pid/smaps 2025-11-20 13:43:58 -08:00
net Including fixes from bluetooth and wireless. 2025-11-06 08:52:30 -08:00
rust rust: kbuild: workaround rustdoc doctests modifier bug 2025-11-04 00:00:06 +01:00
samples Char/Misc/IIO/Binder changes for 6.18-rc1 2025-10-04 16:26:32 -07:00
scripts scripts/decode_stacktrace.sh: fix build ID and PC source parsing 2025-11-09 21:19:45 -08:00
security integrity-v6.18 2025-10-05 10:48:33 -07:00
sound ASoC: Fixes for v6.18 2025-10-30 13:08:08 +01:00
tools mm: introduce VM_MAYBE_GUARD and make visible in /proc/$pid/smaps 2025-11-20 13:43:58 -08:00
usr gen_init_cpio: Ignore fsync() returning EINVAL on pipes 2025-10-07 09:53:05 -07:00
virt KVM x86 fixes for 6.18: 2025-10-18 10:25:43 +02:00
.clang-format memblock: drop for_each_free_mem_pfn_range_in_zone_from() 2025-09-14 08:49:03 +03:00
.clippy.toml rust: clean Rust 1.88.0's warning about clippy::disallowed_macros configuration 2025-05-07 00:11:47 +02:00
.cocciconfig scripts: add Linux .cocciconfig for coccinelle 2016-07-22 12:13:39 +02:00
.editorconfig .editorconfig: remove trim_trailing_whitespace option 2024-06-13 16:47:52 +02:00
.get_maintainer.ignore MAINTAINERS: remove Alyssa Rosenzweig 2025-09-18 21:17:31 +02:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: set diff driver for Rust source code files 2023-05-31 17:48:25 +02:00
.gitignore .gitignore: ignore compile_commands.json globally 2025-08-12 15:53:55 -07:00
.mailmap MAINTAINERS: update David Hildenbrand's email address 2025-11-15 10:52:01 -08:00
.pylintrc tools: docs: parse-headers.py: move it from sphinx dir 2025-08-29 15:54:42 -06:00
.rustfmt.toml rust: add .rustfmt.toml 2022-09-28 09:02:20 +02:00
COPYING COPYING: state that all contributions really are covered by this file 2020-02-10 13:32:20 -08:00
CREDITS MAINTAINERS: mark ISDN subsystem as orphan 2025-10-27 17:49:45 -07:00
Kbuild sched: Make migrate_{en,dis}able() inline 2025-09-25 09:57:16 +02:00
Kconfig io_uring: Rename KConfig to Kconfig 2025-02-19 14:53:27 -07:00
MAINTAINERS mm/hugetlb: extract sysctl into hugetlb_sysctl.c 2025-11-20 13:43:57 -08:00
Makefile Linux 6.18-rc5 2025-11-09 15:10:19 -08:00
README README: Fix spelling 2024-03-18 03:36:32 -06:00

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.