• Jason A. Donenfeld's avatar
    mm: add MAP_DROPPABLE for designating always lazily freeable mappings · 9651fced
    Jason A. Donenfeld authored
    The vDSO getrandom() implementation works with a buffer allocated with a
    new system call that has certain requirements:
    
    - It shouldn't be written to core dumps.
      * Easy: VM_DONTDUMP.
    - It should be zeroed on fork.
      * Easy: VM_WIPEONFORK.
    
    - It shouldn't be written to swap.
      * Uh-oh: mlock is rlimited.
      * Uh-oh: mlock isn't inherited by forks.
    
    - It shouldn't reserve actual memory, but it also shouldn't crash when
      page faulting in memory if none is available
      * Uh-oh: VM_NORESERVE means segfaults.
    
    It turns out that the vDSO getrandom() function has three really nice
    characteristics that we can exploit to solve this problem:
    
    1) Due to being wiped during fork(), the vDSO code is already robust to
       having the contents of the pages it reads zeroed out midway through
       the function's execution.
    
    2) In the absolute worst case of whatever contingency we're coding for,
       we have the option to fallback to the getrandom() syscall, and
       everything is fine.
    
    3) The buffers the function uses are only ever useful for a maximum of
       60 seconds -- a sort of cache, rather than a long term allocation.
    
    These characteristics mean that we can introduce VM_DROPPABLE, which
    has the following semantics:
    
    a) It never is written out to swap.
    b) Under memory pressure, mm can just drop the pages (so that they're
       zero when read back again).
    c) It is inherited by fork.
    d) It doesn't count against the mlock budget, since nothing is locked.
    e) If there's not enough memory to service a page fault, it's not fatal,
       and no signal is sent.
    
    This way, allocations used by vDSO getrandom() can use:
    
        VM_DROPPABLE | VM_DONTDUMP | VM_WIPEONFORK | VM_NORESERVE
    
    And there will be no problem with OOMing, crashing on overcommitment,
    using memory when not in use, not wiping on fork(), coredumps, or
    writing out to swap.
    
    In order to let vDSO getrandom() use this, expose these via mmap(2) as
    MAP_DROPPABLE.
    
    Note that this involves removing the MADV_FREE special case from
    sort_folio(), which according to Yu Zhao is unnecessary and will simply
    result in an extra call to shrink_folio_list() in the worst case. The
    chunk removed reenables the swapbacked flag, which we don't want for
    VM_DROPPABLE, and we can't conditionalize it here because there isn't a
    vma reference available.
    
    Finally, the provided self test ensures that this is working as desired.
    
    Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org
    Acked-by: default avatarDavid Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
    9651fced
droppable.c 1.09 KB