On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 04:12:35PM +0100, Mark Rutland wrote: > On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 08:19:05PM +0800, Leizhen (ThunderTown) wrote: > > On 2016/5/24 19:37, Mark Rutland wrote: > > > On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 07:16:37PM +0800, Zhen Lei wrote: > > >> When we ran mprotect04(a test case in LTP) infinitely, it would always > > >> failed after a few seconds. The case can be described briefly that: copy > > >> a empty function from code area into a new memory area(created by mmap), > > >> then call mprotect to change the protection to PROT_EXEC. The syscall > > >> sys_mprotect will finally invoke flush_cache_range, but this function > > >> currently only invalid icache, the operation of flush dcache is missed. [...] > Jumping back to the problem at hand: > > It looks like we inherited this from ARM, which has done this for all > executable mappings since commit 6060e8df517847bf ("ARM: I-cache: flush > executable mappings in flush_cache_range()"). The commit message refers > to a4db94d, which doesn't seem to exist, and I assume is > 115b22474eb1905d ("ARM: 5794/1: Flush the D-cache during > copy_user_highpage()") which happened to get rebased at some point. > > That all implies that the icache maintenance is only intended to ensure > that CoW does not result in unexpected incoherency. Which in turn > implies that flipping permissions with mprotect is not expected to > synchronise the D and I caches.
Looking through the arm32 history: 2.6.33: 115b22474eb1 ("ARM: 5794/1: Flush the D-cache during copy_user_highpage()") 6060e8df5178 ("ARM: I-cache: flush executable mappings in flush_cache_range()") These both take care of the CoW issue with executable pages. 2.6.37: 6012191aa9c6 ("ARM: 6380/1: Introduce __sync_icache_dcache() for VIPT caches") The above is a fix for SMP systems where update_mmu_cache() happens after the PTE was actually written, so slight chance of race with another CPU. We generalised it to all ARMv6+ systems (so VIPT caches). 3.1: c7e89b16eb90 ("ARM: 6995/2: mm: remove unnecessary cache flush on v6 copypage") That's when we realised that the CoW problem no longer exists for non-aliasing VIPT caches. However, the I-cache counterpart 6060e8df5178 has not been reverted. So I think that for arm64 and arm32 with non-aliasing VIPT, flush_cache_range() can safely be a no-op. -- Catalin