Re: [PATCH RESEND] userfaultfd: snapshot VMA state across UFFDIO_COPY retry

["David Hildenbrand (Arm)" <david@kernel.org>]

On 5/25/26 19:12, Liam R. Howlett wrote:
> On 26/05/20 04:38PM, David Hildenbrand (Arm) wrote:
>> On 5/20/26 16:12, Mike Rapoport wrote:
>>>
>>> Let me reiterate:
>>>
>>> A thread doing UFFDIO_COPY releases the VMA in mfill_copy_folio_retry(),
>>> re-gets the VMA and checks if the per-MM counter stayed the same.
>>>
>>> If another thread makes any change to VMA while mfill_copy_folio_retry()
>>> waits to re-get the VMA, the counter would be incremented by another
>>> thread. mfill_copy_folio_retry() will see the change after mfill_get_vma()
>>> and will bail out with -EAGAIN.
>>>
>>
>> Yeah.
> 
> This isn't bulletproof anyways.  The sequence count can wrap.  So, if
> someone can replace the vma then cause the sequence counter wrap, then
> you can be fooled into thinking it's okay (we had this problem years ago
> with the vmacache using a 32 bit counter, iirc).

If you can get it to wrap for such short durations, then how would sequence
counters possibly work in any reasonable context?

-- 
Cheers,

David