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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2019-07-11 09:54:40 -0700
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>2019-07-31 07:28:58 +0200
commit8b941011f2df201abf1e6d2d613b7528b8ab6682 (patch)
parent26bee6ef0d72193d58a085610fe49169d23baa83 (diff)
access: avoid the RCU grace period for the temporary subjective credentials
commit d7852fbd0f0423937fa287a598bfde188bb68c22 upstream. It turns out that 'access()' (and 'faccessat()') can cause a lot of RCU work because it installs a temporary credential that gets allocated and freed for each system call. The allocation and freeing overhead is mostly benign, but because credentials can be accessed under the RCU read lock, the freeing involves a RCU grace period. Which is not a huge deal normally, but if you have a lot of access() calls, this causes a fair amount of seconday damage: instead of having a nice alloc/free patterns that hits in hot per-CPU slab caches, you have all those delayed free's, and on big machines with hundreds of cores, the RCU overhead can end up being enormous. But it turns out that all of this is entirely unnecessary. Exactly because access() only installs the credential as the thread-local subjective credential, the temporary cred pointer doesn't actually need to be RCU free'd at all. Once we're done using it, we can just free it synchronously and avoid all the RCU overhead. So add a 'non_rcu' flag to 'struct cred', which can be set by users that know they only use it in non-RCU context (there are other potential users for this). We can make it a union with the rcu freeing list head that we need for the RCU case, so this doesn't need any extra storage. Note that this also makes 'get_current_cred()' clear the new non_rcu flag, in case we have filesystems that take a long-term reference to the cred and then expect the RCU delayed freeing afterwards. It's not entirely clear that this is required, but it makes for clear semantics: the subjective cred remains non-RCU as long as you only access it synchronously using the thread-local accessors, but you _can_ use it as a generic cred if you want to. It is possible that we should just remove the whole RCU markings for ->cred entirely. Only ->real_cred is really supposed to be accessed through RCU, and the long-term cred copies that nfs uses might want to explicitly re-enable RCU freeing if required, rather than have get_current_cred() do it implicitly. But this is a "minimal semantic changes" change for the immediate problem. Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Acked-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com> Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.ibm.com> Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com> Cc: Jan Glauber <jglauber@marvell.com> Cc: Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org> Cc: Jayachandran Chandrasekharan Nair <jnair@marvell.com> Cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Cc: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu> Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
3 files changed, 44 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/fs/open.c b/fs/open.c
index f4ea0dc88823..29a2cdcbcb17 100644
--- a/fs/open.c
+++ b/fs/open.c
@@ -379,6 +379,25 @@ SYSCALL_DEFINE3(faccessat, int, dfd, const char __user *, filename, int, mode)
+ /*
+ * The new set of credentials can *only* be used in
+ * task-synchronous circumstances, and does not need
+ * RCU freeing, unless somebody then takes a separate
+ * reference to it.
+ *
+ * NOTE! This is _only_ true because this credential
+ * is used purely for override_creds() that installs
+ * it as the subjective cred. Other threads will be
+ * accessing ->real_cred, not the subjective cred.
+ *
+ * If somebody _does_ make a copy of this (using the
+ * 'get_current_cred()' function), that will clear the
+ * non_rcu field, because now that other user may be
+ * expecting RCU freeing. But normal thread-synchronous
+ * cred accesses will keep things non-RCY.
+ */
+ override_cred->non_rcu = 1;
old_cred = override_creds(override_cred);
res = user_path_at(dfd, filename, lookup_flags, &path);
diff --git a/include/linux/cred.h b/include/linux/cred.h
index 631286535d0f..2a0d4674294e 100644
--- a/include/linux/cred.h
+++ b/include/linux/cred.h
@@ -145,7 +145,11 @@ struct cred {
struct user_struct *user; /* real user ID subscription */
struct user_namespace *user_ns; /* user_ns the caps and keyrings are relative to. */
struct group_info *group_info; /* supplementary groups for euid/fsgid */
- struct rcu_head rcu; /* RCU deletion hook */
+ /* RCU deletion */
+ union {
+ int non_rcu; /* Can we skip RCU deletion? */
+ struct rcu_head rcu; /* RCU deletion hook */
+ };
} __randomize_layout;
extern void __put_cred(struct cred *);
@@ -243,6 +247,7 @@ static inline const struct cred *get_cred(const struct cred *cred)
struct cred *nonconst_cred = (struct cred *) cred;
+ nonconst_cred->non_rcu = 0;
return get_new_cred(nonconst_cred);
diff --git a/kernel/cred.c b/kernel/cred.c
index efd04b2ec84c..5ab1f7ec946e 100644
--- a/kernel/cred.c
+++ b/kernel/cred.c
@@ -147,7 +147,10 @@ void __put_cred(struct cred *cred)
BUG_ON(cred == current->cred);
BUG_ON(cred == current->real_cred);
- call_rcu(&cred->rcu, put_cred_rcu);
+ if (cred->non_rcu)
+ put_cred_rcu(&cred->rcu);
+ else
+ call_rcu(&cred->rcu, put_cred_rcu);
@@ -258,6 +261,7 @@ struct cred *prepare_creds(void)
old = task->cred;
memcpy(new, old, sizeof(struct cred));
+ new->non_rcu = 0;
atomic_set(&new->usage, 1);
set_cred_subscribers(new, 0);
@@ -537,7 +541,19 @@ const struct cred *override_creds(const struct cred *new)
- get_cred(new);
+ /*
+ * NOTE! This uses 'get_new_cred()' rather than 'get_cred()'.
+ *
+ * That means that we do not clear the 'non_rcu' flag, since
+ * we are only installing the cred into the thread-synchronous
+ * '->cred' pointer, not the '->real_cred' pointer that is
+ * visible to other threads under RCU.
+ *
+ * Also note that we did validate_creds() manually, not depending
+ * on the validation in 'get_cred()'.
+ */
+ get_new_cred((struct cred *)new);
alter_cred_subscribers(new, 1);
rcu_assign_pointer(current->cred, new);
alter_cred_subscribers(old, -1);
@@ -620,6 +636,7 @@ struct cred *prepare_kernel_cred(struct task_struct *daemon)
*new = *old;
+ new->non_rcu = 0;
atomic_set(&new->usage, 1);
set_cred_subscribers(new, 0);