On 10/04/2018 07:05 AM, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote: > The PKRU value is not set for kernel threads because they do not have > the ->initialized value set. As a result the kernel thread has a random > PKRU value set which it inherits from the previous task. > It has been suggested by Paolo Bonzini to set it for kernel threads, too > because it might be a fix. > I *think* this is not required because the kernel threads don't copy > data to/from userland and don't have access to any userspace mm in > general. > However there is this use_mm(). If we gain a mm by use_mm() we don't > have a matching PKRU value because those are per thread. It has been > suggested to use 0 as the PKRU value but this would bypass PKRU. > > Set the initial (default) PKRU value for kernel threads.
We might want to do this for cleanliness reasons... Maybe. But this *should* have no practical effects. Kernel threads have no real 'mm' and no user pages. They should not have do access to user mappings. Protection keys *only* apply to user mappings. Thus, logically, they should never be affected by PKRU values. So I'm kinda missing the point of the patch.
