Avoiding page reference-count overflows

Avoiding page reference-count overflows

Posted Apr 19, 2019 9:45 UTC (Fri) by mm7323 (subscriber, #87386)
In reply to: Avoiding page reference-count overflows by willy
Parent article: Avoiding page reference-count overflows

You should write for The Register....

If you are going to tell me where I should write, may I respectfully suggest that as a leading linux kernel developer, perhaps you should read the CoC and at least choose a more respectful tone in your replies. This isn't the lkml and serves a more diverse audience. It's reasonable to expect different levels of understanding here.

It is, however, unworthy of an LWN comment.

That is just your opinion; I don't believe you speak on behalf of LWN.

it would be a ridiculous amount of change for a fix.

Having read and re-read the article and comments, that seems to be the crux of the argument for making a new mechanism. Apart from "refcount_t isn't the appropriate fix for this problem", I don't see where any critical technical limitation of refcount_t is stated.

Short-cutting the work to make this change might have been the best option here, but it's surely creating technical debt. For a "vulnerability [that] is sufficiently difficult to exploit that almost nobody should feel the need to rush out a kernel update", I hope it is worth it.

Thanks for all your hard work all the same

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