Re: [PATCH v7 0/6] x86: Improve Minimum Alternate Stack Size

* Ingo Molnar [off-list ref] wrote:

* Chang S. Bae [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

During signal entry, the kernel pushes data onto the normal userspace
stack. On x86, the data pushed onto the user stack includes XSAVE state,
which has grown over time as new features and larger registers have been
added to the architecture.

MINSIGSTKSZ is a constant provided in the kernel signal.h headers and
typically distributed in lib-dev(el) packages, e.g. [1]. Its value is
compiled into programs and is part of the user/kernel ABI. The MINSIGSTKSZ
constant indicates to userspace how much data the kernel expects to push on
the user stack, [2][3].

However, this constant is much too small and does not reflect recent
additions to the architecture. For instance, when AVX-512 states are in
use, the signal frame size can be 3.5KB while MINSIGSTKSZ remains 2KB.

The bug report [4] explains this as an ABI issue. The small MINSIGSTKSZ can
cause user stack overflow when delivering a signal.

quoted

  uapi: Define the aux vector AT_MINSIGSTKSZ
  x86/signal: Introduce helpers to get the maximum signal frame size
  x86/elf: Support a new ELF aux vector AT_MINSIGSTKSZ
  selftest/sigaltstack: Use the AT_MINSIGSTKSZ aux vector if available
  x86/signal: Detect and prevent an alternate signal stack overflow
  selftest/x86/signal: Include test cases for validating sigaltstack

So this looks really complicated, is this justified?

Why not just internally round up sigaltstack size if it's too small? 
This would be more robust, as it would fix applications that use 
MINSIGSTKSZ but don't use the new AT_MINSIGSTKSZ facility.

I.e. does AT_MINSIGSTKSZ have any other uses than avoiding the 
segfault if MINSIGSTKSZ is used to create a small signal stack?

I.e. if the kernel sees a too small ->ss_size in sigaltstack() it 
would ignore ->ss_sp and mmap() a new sigaltstack instead and use that 
for the signal handler stack.

This would automatically make MINSIGSTKSZ - and other too small sizes 
work today, and in the future.

But the question is, is there user-space usage of sigaltstacks that 
relies on controlling or reading the contents of the stack?

longjmp using programs perhaps?

Thanks,

	Ingo