Subject: Re: [RFC v5 12/38] mm: ability to disable execute permission on a key at creation

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2017 07:29:37 +1000

On Tue, 2017-07-11 at 11:11 -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On 07/05/2017 02:21 PM, Ram Pai wrote:
> > Currently sys_pkey_create() provides the ability to disable read
> > and write permission on the key, at  creation. powerpc  has  the
> > hardware support to disable execute on a pkey as well.This patch
> > enhances the interface to let disable execute  at  key  creation
> > time. x86 does  not  allow  this.  Hence the next patch will add
> > ability  in  x86  to  return  error  if  PKEY_DISABLE_EXECUTE is
> > specified.

That leads to the question... How do you tell userspace.

(apologies if I missed that in an existing patch in the series)

How do we inform userspace of the key capabilities ? There are at least
two things userspace may want to know already:

 - What protection bits are supported for a key

 - How many keys exist

 - Which keys are available for use by userspace. On PowerPC, the
kernel can reserve some keys for itself, so can the hypervisor. In
fact, they do.

Cheers,
Ben.