userfaultfd: allow signals to interrupt a userfault
This is only simple to achieve if the userfault is going to return to
userland (not to the kernel) because we can avoid returning VM_FAULT_RETRY
despite we temporarily released the mmap_sem. The fault would just be
retried by userland then. This is safe at least on x86 and powerpc (the
two archs with the syscall implemented so far).
Hint to verify for which archs this is safe: after handle_mm_fault
returns, no access to data structures protected by the mmap_sem must be
done by the fault code in arch/*/mm/fault.c until up_read(&mm->mmap_sem)
is called.
This has two main benefits: signals can run with lower latency in
production (signals aren't blocked by userfaults and userfaults are
immediately repeated after signal processing) and gdb can then trivially
debug the threads blocked in this kind of userfaults coming directly from
userland.
On a side note: while gdb has a need to get signal processed, coredumps
always worked perfectly with userfaults, no matter if the userfault is
triggered by GUP a kernel copy_user or directly from userland.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 file changed