Re: [netfilter-core] kernel panic: Out of memory and no killable processes... (2)

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Tue 30-01-18 11:27:45, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Jan 2018 15:01:04 +0100 Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> wrote:
> 
> > > Well, this is not about syzkaller, it merely pointed out a potential
> > > DoS... And that has to be addressed somehow.
> > 
> > So how about this?
> > ---
> 
> argh ;)

doh, those hardwired moves...

> > >From d48e950f1b04f234b57b9e34c363bdcfec10aeee Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> > From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
> > Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 14:51:07 +0100
> > Subject: [PATCH] net/netfilter/x_tables.c: make allocation less aggressive
> > 
> > syzbot has noticed that xt_alloc_table_info can allocate a lot of
> > memory. This is an admin only interface but an admin in a namespace
> > is sufficient as well. eacd86ca3b03 ("net/netfilter/x_tables.c: use
> > kvmalloc() in xt_alloc_table_info()") has changed the opencoded
> > kmalloc->vmalloc fallback into kvmalloc. It has dropped __GFP_NORETRY on
> > the way because vmalloc has simply never fully supported __GFP_NORETRY
> > semantic. This is still the case because e.g. page tables backing the
> > vmalloc area are hardcoded GFP_KERNEL.
> > 
> > Revert back to __GFP_NORETRY as a poors man defence against excessively
> > large allocation request here. We will not rule out the OOM killer
> > completely but __GFP_NORETRY should at least stop the large request
> > in most cases.
> > 
> > Fixes: eacd86ca3b03 ("net/netfilter/x_tables.c: use kvmalloc() in xt_alloc_table_info()")
> > Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
> > ---
> >  net/netfilter/x_tables.c | 8 +++++++-
> >  1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> > 
> > diff --git a/net/netfilter/x_tables.c b/net/netfilter/x_tables.c
> > index d8571f414208..a5f5c29bcbdc 100644
> > --- a/net/netfilter/x_tables.c
> > +++ b/net/netfilter/x_tables.c
> > @@ -1003,7 +1003,13 @@ struct xt_table_info *xt_alloc_table_info(unsigned int size)
> >  	if ((SMP_ALIGN(size) >> PAGE_SHIFT) + 2 > totalram_pages)
> >  		return NULL;
> 
> offtopic: preceding comment here is "prevent them from hitting BUG() in
> vmalloc.c".  I suspect this is ancient code and vmalloc sure as heck
> shouldn't go BUG with this input.  And it should be using `sz' ;)

Yeah, we do not BUG but rather fail instead. See __vmalloc_node_range.
My excavation tools pointed me to "VM: Rework vmalloc code to support mapping of arbitray pages"
by Christoph back in 2002. So yes, we can safely remove it finally. Se
below.