Re: [PATCH 1/4] glibc: Perform rseq(2) registration at C startup and thread creation (v7)

From: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
To: Carlos O'Donell <codonell@redhat.com>
Cc: Tulio Magno Quites Machado Filho <tuliom@ascii.art.br>,
	Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>,
	Michael Meissner <meissner@linux.ibm.com>,
	Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com>,
	Peter Bergner <bergner@vnet.ibm.com>,
	Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>,
	Paul Burton <paul.burton@mips.com>,
	Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>,
	Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com>,
	heiko carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>,
	gor <gor@linux.ibm.com>, schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>,
	"Russell King, ARM Linux" <linux@armlinux.org.uk>,
	Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>,
	Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>, carlos <carlos@redhat.com>,
	Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>,
	Szabolcs Nagy <szabolcs.nagy@arm.com>,
	libc-alpha <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, Ben Maurer <bmaurer@fb.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
	"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Dave Watson <davejwatson@fb.com>, Paul Turner <pjt@google.com>,
	Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>,
	linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	linux-api <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/4] glibc: Perform rseq(2) registration at C startup and thread creation (v7)
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2019 12:33:55 -0400 (EDT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1123305370.2393.1554827635212.JavaMail.zimbra@efficios.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <ce9fbc66-5eb9-0fa9-99fa-5abfe00ddfc2@redhat.com>

----- On Apr 8, 2019, at 5:45 PM, Carlos O'Donell codonell@redhat.com wrote:

> On 4/8/19 3:20 PM, Tulio Magno Quites Machado Filho wrote:
>> Carlos O'Donell <codonell@redhat.com> writes:
>> 
>>> On 4/5/19 5:16 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
>>>> * Carlos O'Donell:
>>>>> It is valuable that it be a trap, particularly for constant pools because
>>>>> it means that a jump into the constant pool will trap.
>>>>
>>>> Sorry, I don't understand why this matters in this context.  Would you
>>>> please elaborate?
>>>
>>> Sorry, I wasn't very clear.
>>>
>>> My point is only that any accidental jumps, either with off-by-one (like you
>>> fixed in gcc/glibc's signal unwinding most recently), result in a process fault
>>> rather than executing RSEQ_SIG as a valid instruction *and then* continuing
>>> onwards to the handler.
>>>
>>> A process fault is achieved either by a trap, or an invalid instruction, or
>>> a privileged insn (like suggested for MIPS in this thread).
>> 
>> In that case, mtmsr (Move to Machine State Register) seems a good candidate.
>> 
>> mtmsr is available both on 32 and 64 bits since their first implementations.
>> 
>> It's a privileged instruction and should never appear in userspace
>> code (causes SIGILL).
>> 
>> Any comments?
>  
> That seems good to me.
> 
> Mathieu,
> 
> What's required to move this forward for POWER?

First, we need to decide whether we need rseq to support more than
one signature per process to cover the VLE extension. If so, we'd
need to extend rseq with a new flag for future kernels.

Then, ideally, we'd need a patch on top of the Linux kernel
tools/testing/selftests/rseq/rseq-ppc.h file that updates
the signature value. I think the current discussion leads us
towards a trap:

/*
 * TODO: document instruction objdump output on each architecture and VLE
 * instruction sets.
 */
#define RSEQ_SIG 0x0fe5000b

Should we do anything specific for big/little endian ? Is the byte order
of the instruction encoding the same as data ?

Thanks,

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
http://www.efficios.com