On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 08:10:35AM -0700, Yu-cheng Yu wrote:

There is essentially no room left in the x86 hardware PTEs on some OSes
(not Linux).  That left the hardware architects looking for a way to
represent a new memory type (shadow stack) within the existing bits.
They chose to repurpose a lightly-used state: Write=0, Dirty=1.

The reason it's lightly used is that Dirty=1 is normally set by hardware
and cannot normally be set by hardware on a Write=0 PTE.  Software must
normally be involved to create one of these PTEs, so software can simply
opt to not create them.

In places where Linux normally creates Write=0, Dirty=1, it can use the
software-defined _PAGE_COW in place of the hardware _PAGE_DIRTY.  In other
words, whenever Linux needs to create Write=0, Dirty=1, it instead creates
Write=0, Cow=1, except for shadow stack, which is Write=0, Dirty=1.  This
clearly separates shadow stack from other data, and results in the
following:

(a) A modified, copy-on-write (COW) page: (Write=0, Cow=1)
(b) A R/O page that has been COW'ed: (Write=0, Cow=1)
    The user page is in a R/O VMA, and get_user_pages() needs a writable
    copy.  The page fault handler creates a copy of the page and sets
    the new copy's PTE as Write=0 and Cow=1.
(c) A shadow stack PTE: (Write=0, Dirty=1)
(d) A shared shadow stack PTE: (Write=0, Cow=1)
    When a shadow stack page is being shared among processes (this happens
    at fork()), its PTE is made Dirty=0, so the next shadow stack access
    causes a fault, and the page is duplicated and Dirty=1 is set again.
    This is the COW equivalent for shadow stack pages, even though it's
    copy-on-access rather than copy-on-write.
(e) A page where the processor observed a Write=1 PTE, started a write, set
    Dirty=1, but then observed a Write=0 PTE.  That's possible today, but
    will not happen on processors that support shadow stack.

Define _PAGE_COW and update pte_*() helpers and apply the same changes to
pmd and pud.

After this, there are six free bits left in the 64-bit PTE, and no more
free bits in the 32-bit PTE (except for PAE) and Shadow Stack is not
implemented for the 32-bit kernel.

Signed-off-by: Yu-cheng Yu <redacted>

Reviewed-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <redacted>

-- 
 Kirill A. Shutemov