Hi Paul,
Happy new year.
On 02/01/2020 04:50, Paul Burton wrote:
Declaring __current_thread_info as a global register variable has the effect of preventing GCC from saving & restoring its value in cases where the ABI would typically do so.
To quote GCC documentation:
If the register is a call-saved register, call ABI is affected: the register will not be restored in function epilogue sequences after the variable has been assigned. Therefore, functions cannot safely return to callers that assume standard ABI.
When our position independent VDSO is built for the n32 or n64 ABIs all functions it exposes should be preserving the value of $gp/$28 for their caller, but in the presence of the __current_thread_info global register variable GCC stops doing so & simply clobbers $gp/$28 when calculating the address of the GOT.
In cases where the VDSO returns success this problem will typically be masked by the caller in libc returning & restoring $gp/$28 itself, but that is by no means guaranteed. In cases where the VDSO returns an error libc will typically contain a fallback path which will now fail (typically with a bad memory access) if it attempts anything which relies upon the value of $gp/$28 - eg. accessing anything via the GOT.
First of all good catch. I just came back from holidays and seems that you guys had fun without me :)
Did you consider the option to use "-ffixed-gp -ffixed-28" as a compilation flags for the vDSO library (Arvind was mentioning it as well in his reply)? According to the GCC manual "treats the register as a fixed register; generated code should never refer to it" (https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Code-Gen-Options.html#Code-Gen-Options)
I did some experiments this morning an seems that on MIPS the convention is not honored at least on GCC-9. Do you know who to contact to get it enabled/fixed in the compiler?
With this:
Reviewed-by: Vincenzo Frascino vincenzo.frascino@arm.com Tested-by: Vincenzo Frascino vincenzo.frascino@arm.com
One fix for this would be to move the declaration of __current_thread_info inside the current_thread_info() function, demoting it from global register variable to local register variable & avoiding inadvertently creating a non-standard calling ABI for the VDSO. Unfortunately this causes issues for clang, which doesn't support local register variables as pointed out by commit fe92da0f355e ("MIPS: Changed current_thread_info() to an equivalent supported by both clang and GCC") which introduced the global register variable before we had a VDSO to worry about.
Instead, fix this by continuing to use the global register variable for the kernel proper but declare __current_thread_info as a simple extern variable when building the VDSO. It should never be referenced, and will cause a link error if it is. This resolves the calling convention issue for the VDSO without having any impact upon the build of the kernel itself for either clang or gcc.
Signed-off-by: Paul Burton paulburton@kernel.org Reported-by: "Jason A. Donenfeld" Jason@zx2c4.com Fixes: ebb5e78cc634 ("MIPS: Initial implementation of a VDSO") Cc: Arnd Bergmann arnd@arndb.de Cc: Christian Brauner christian.brauner@canonical.com Cc: Vincenzo Frascino vincenzo.frascino@arm.com Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v4.4+
Changes in v2:
- Switch to the #ifdef __VDSO__ approach rather than using a local register variable which clang doesn't support.
arch/mips/include/asm/thread_info.h | 20 +++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 19 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/arch/mips/include/asm/thread_info.h b/arch/mips/include/asm/thread_info.h index 4993db40482c..ee26f9a4575d 100644 --- a/arch/mips/include/asm/thread_info.h +++ b/arch/mips/include/asm/thread_info.h @@ -49,8 +49,26 @@ struct thread_info { .addr_limit = KERNEL_DS, \ } -/* How to get the thread information struct from C. */ +/*
- A pointer to the struct thread_info for the currently executing thread is
- held in register $28/$gp.
- We declare __current_thread_info as a global register variable rather than a
- local register variable within current_thread_info() because clang doesn't
- support explicit local register variables.
- When building the VDSO we take care not to declare the global register
- variable because this causes GCC to not preserve the value of $28/$gp in
- functions that change its value (which is common in the PIC VDSO when
- accessing the GOT). Since the VDSO shouldn't be accessing
- __current_thread_info anyway we declare it extern in order to cause a link
- failure if it's referenced.
- */
+#ifdef __VDSO__ +extern struct thread_info *__current_thread_info; +#else register struct thread_info *__current_thread_info __asm__("$28"); +#endif static inline struct thread_info *current_thread_info(void) {