Hi Sumit,
TBH: I was hoping that you will take care of this since you're marked as maintainer for the tee-trusted-key and we noticed the warning with 6.14 and still no fix available :/
However please see below for further discussion.
On 25-04-28, Jens Wiklander wrote:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2025 at 5:42 AM Sumit Garg sumit.garg@kernel.org wrote:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 02:47:46PM +0100, Jens Wiklander wrote:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 12:07 PM Marco Felsch m.felsch@pengutronix.de wrote:
On 25-03-26, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2025 at 09:07:39PM +0100, Marco Felsch wrote:
Skip manipulating the refcount in case of slab pages according commit b9c0e49abfca ("mm: decline to manipulate the refcount on a slab page").
This almost certainly isn't right. I know nothing about TEE, but that you are doing this indicates a problem. The hack that we put into networking should not be blindly replicated.
Why are you taking a reference on the pages to begin with? Is it copy and pasted from somewhere else, or was there actual thought put into it?
Not sure, this belongs to the TEE maintainers.
I don't know. We were getting the user pages first, so I assume we just did the same thing when we added support for kernel pages.
If it's "prevent the caller from freeing the allocation", well, it never accomplished that with slab allocations. So for callers that do kmalloc (eg setup_mm_hdr() in drivers/firmware/efi/stmm/tee_stmm_efi.c), you have to rely on them not freeing the allocation while the TEE driver has it.
It's not just about the TEE driver but rather if the TEE implementation (a trusted OS) to whom the page is registered with. We don't want the trusted OS to work on registered kernel pages if they gets free somehow in the TEE client driver. Having a reference in the TEE subsystem assured us that won't happen. But if you say slab allocations are still prone the kernel pages getting freed even after refcount then can you suggest how should we handle this better?
As otherwise it can cause very hard to debug problems if trusted OS can manipulate kernel pages that are no longer available.
We must be able to rely on the kernel callers to have the needed references before calling tee_shm_register_kernel_buf() and to keep those until after calling tee_shm_free().
I checked the code once again and figured that we could drop/replace tee_shm_register_kernel_buf() with tee_shm_alloc_kernel_buf(). I don't see why a kernel driver needs to tee_shm_register_kernel_buf() in the first place, maybe this is legacy. The only users of tee_shm_register_kernel_buf() are trusted_tee.c and tee_stmm_efi.c.
+Cc the efi-stmm folks since they will be affected by this change as well.
Regards, Marco
And if that's your API contract, then there's no point in taking refcounts on other kinds of pages either; it's just unnecessary atomic instructions. So the right patch might be something like this:
+++ b/drivers/tee/tee_shm.c @@ -15,29 +15,11 @@ #include <linux/highmem.h> #include "tee_private.h"
I had the same diff but didn't went this way since we can't be sure that iov's are always slab backed. As far as I understood IOVs. In 'worst-case' scenario an iov can be backed by different page types too.
We're only using kvec's. Briefly, before commit 7bdee4157591 ("tee: Use iov_iter to better support shared buffer registration") we checked with is_vmalloc_addr() || is_kmap_addr(). I like Matthew's suggestion, it's nice to fix problems by deleting code. :-)
Sumit, you know the callers better. What do you think?
If we don't have a sane way to refcont registered kernel pages in TEE subsystem then yeah we have to solely rely on the client drivers to behave properly. Nevertheless, it's still within the kernel boundaries which we can rely upon.
Yes.
Cheers, Jens