x86: use the right protections for split-up pagetables
Steven Rostedt found a bug in where in his modified kernel ftrace was unable to modify the kernel text, due to the PMD itself having been marked read-only as well in split_large_page(). The fix, suggested by Linus, is to not try to 'clone' the reference protection of a huge-page, but to use the standard (and permissive) page protection bits of KERNPG_TABLE. The 'cloning' makes sense for the ptes but it's a confused and incorrect concept at the page table level - because the pagetable entry is a set of all ptes and hence cannot 'clone' any single protection attribute - the ptes can be any mixture of protections. With the permissive KERNPG_TABLE, even if the pte protections get changed after this point (due to ftrace doing code-patching or other similar activities like kprobes), the resulting combined protections will still be correct and the pte's restrictive (or permissive) protections will control it. Also update the comment. This bug was there for a long time but has not caused visible problems before as it needs a rather large read-only area to trigger. Steve possibly hacked his kernel with some really large arrays or so. Anyway, the bug is definitely worth fixing. [ Huang Ying also experienced problems in this area when writing the EFI code, but the real bug in split_large_page() was not realized back then. ] Reported-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> Reported-by: Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com> Acked-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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