Re: [PATCH 1/2] x86/stackprotector/32: Make the canary into a regular percpu variable

[Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2020 at 3:31 PM Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> On 32-bit kernels, the stackprotector canary is quite nasty -- it is
> stored at %gs:(20), which is nasty because 32-bit kernels use %fs for
> percpu storage.  It's even nastier because it means that whether %gs
> contains userspace state or kernel state while running kernel code
> sepends on whether stackprotector is enabled (this is
> CONFIG_X86_32_LAZY_GS), and this setting radically changes the way
> that segment selectors work.  Supporting both variants is a
> maintenance and testing mess.
>
> Merely rearranging so that percpu and the stack canary
> share the same segment would be messy as the 32-bit percpu address
> layout isn't currently compatible with putting a variable at a fixed
> offset.
>
> Fortunately, GCC 8.1 added options that allow the stack canary to be
> accessed as %fs:stack_canary, effectively turning it into an ordinary
> percpu variable.  This lets us get rid of all of the code to manage
> the stack canary GDT descriptor and the CONFIG_X86_32_LAZY_GS mess.
>
> This patch forcibly disables stackprotector on older compilers that
> don't support the new options and makes the stack canary into a
> percpu variable.

This doesn't consider !SMP builds, where per-cpu variable are just
normal variables, and the FS segment is disabled.  Unfortunately,
-mstack-protector-guard-reg=ds is not accepted.  The simplest fix
would be to define  __KERNEL_PERCPU when either SMP or STACKPROTECTOR
are enabled.

--
Brian Gerst