The lazy cache flushing implemented in the MIPS kernel suffers from a
race condition that is exposed by do_set_pte() in mm/memory.c.
A pre-condition is a file-system that writes to the page from the CPU
in its readpage method and then calls flush_dcache_page(). One example
is ubifs. Another pre-condition is that the dcache flush is postponed
in __flush_dcache_page().
Upon a page fault for an executable mapping not existing in the
page-cache, the following will happen:
1. Write to the page
2. flush_dcache_page
3. flush_icache_page
4. set_pte_at
5. update_mmu_cache (commits the flush of a dcache-dirty page)
Between steps 4 and 5 another thread can hit the same page and it will
encounter a valid pte. Because the data still is in the L1 dcache the CPU
will fetch stale data from L2 into the icache and execute garbage.
This fix moves the commit of the cache flush to step 3 to close the
race window. It also reduces the amount of flushes on non-executable
mappings because we never enter __flush_dcache_page() for non-aliasing
CPUs.
Regressions can occur in drivers that mistakenly relies on the
flush_dcache_page() in get_user_pages() for DMA operations.
[ralf@linux-mips.org: Folded in patch 9346 to fix highmem issue.]