Re: [PATCH v4 01/12] mm/shmem: Introduce F_SEAL_INACCESSIBLE

[Andy Lutomirski]

On 1/18/22 05:21, Chao Peng wrote:
> From: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
>
> Introduce a new seal F_SEAL_INACCESSIBLE indicating the content of
> the file is inaccessible from userspace through ordinary MMU access
> (e.g., read/write/mmap). However, the file content can be accessed
> via a different mechanism (e.g. KVM MMU) indirectly.
>
> It provides semantics required for KVM guest private memory support
> that a file descriptor with this seal set is going to be used as the
> source of guest memory in confidential computing environments such
> as Intel TDX/AMD SEV but may not be accessible from host userspace.
>
> At this time only shmem implements this seal.

I don't dislike this *that* much, but I do dislike this. 
F_SEAL_INACCESSIBLE essentially transmutes a memfd into a different type 
of object.  While this can apparently be done successfully and without 
races (as in this code), it's at least awkward.  I think that either 
creating a special inaccessible memfd should be a single operation that 
create the correct type of object or there should be a clear 
justification for why it's a two-step process.

(Imagine if the way to create an eventfd would be to call 
timerfd_create() and then do a special fcntl to turn it into an eventfd 
but only if it's not currently armed.  This would be weird.)