On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 02:32:34PM -0500, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi wrote:
Introduce a mechanism to quickly disable/enable syscall handling for a specific process and redirect to userspace via SIGSYS. This is useful for processes with parts that require syscall redirection and parts that don't, but who need to perform this boundary crossing really fast, without paying the cost of a system call to reconfigure syscall handling on each boundary transition. This is particularly important for Windows games running over Wine.
The proposed interface looks like this:
prctl(PR_SET_SYSCALL_USER_DISPATCH, <op>, <off>, <length>, [selector])
The range [<offset>,<offset>+<length>) is a part of the process memory map that is allowed to by-pass the redirection code and dispatch syscalls directly, such that in fast paths a process doesn't need to disable the trap nor the kernel has to check the selector. This is essential to return from SIGSYS to a blocked area without triggering another SIGSYS from rt_sigreturn.
selector is an optional pointer to a char-sized userspace memory region that has a key switch for the mechanism. This key switch is set to either PR_SYS_DISPATCH_ON, PR_SYS_DISPATCH_OFF to enable and disable the redirection without calling the kernel.
The feature is meant to be set per-thread and it is disabled on fork/clone/execv.
Internally, this doesn't add overhead to the syscall hot path, and it requires very little per-architecture support. I avoided using seccomp, even though it duplicates some functionality, due to previous feedback that maybe it shouldn't mix with seccomp since it is not a security mechanism. And obviously, this should never be considered a security mechanism, since any part of the program can by-pass it by using the syscall dispatcher.
For the sysinfo benchmark, which measures the overhead added to executing a native syscall that doesn't require interception, the overhead using only the direct dispatcher region to issue syscalls is pretty much irrelevant. The overhead of using the selector goes around 40ns for a native (unredirected) syscall in my system, and it is (as expected) dominated by the supervisor-mode user-address access. In fact, with SMAP off, the overhead is consistently less than 5ns on my test box.
Cc: Matthew Wilcox willy@infradead.org Cc: Andy Lutomirski luto@kernel.org Cc: Paul Gofman gofmanp@gmail.com Cc: Kees Cook keescook@chromium.org Cc: linux-api@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Gabriel Krisman Bertazi krisman@collabora.com
Acked-by: Kees Cook keescook@chromium.org