Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/1] Fixup write permission of TLB on powerpc e500 core

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2011 19:07:15 +1000

On Fri, 2011-07-15 at 16:38 +0800, MailingLists wrote:
> A page could be set to read only by the kernel (supervisor in the
> powerpc
> literature) on the e500, and that's what the kernel do. Set
> SW(supervisor
> write) bit in the TLB entry to grant write permission to the kernel on
> a
> page.
> 
> And further the SW bit is set according to the DIRTY flag of the PTE,
> PTE.DIRTY is set in the do_page_fault(), the futex_lock_pi() disabled
> page fault, the PTE.DIRTY never can be set, so do the SW bit,
> unbreakable
> COW occurred, infinite loop followed. 

That would be it ... the SW dirty and young tracking relies on faults to
fixup things in handle_pte_fault(). If the "disable page fault" thingy
happens before we get there, then we have a pretty nasty bug. Note that
this will hit more than just e500 (and in fact any architecture that
relies on SW to do dirty and young tracking).

Cheers,
Ben.