Re: x86-64: Maintain 16-byte stack alignment

On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 09:03:18AM -0600, Josh Poimboeuf wrote:

On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 11:51:10PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 11:05 PM, Herbert Xu
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 09:05:28AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

I'm pretty sure we have random asm code that may not maintain a
16-byte stack alignment when it calls other code (including, in some
cases, calling C code).

So I'm not at all convinced that this is a good idea. We shouldn't
expect 16-byte alignment to be something trustworthy.

So what if we audited all the x86 assembly code to fix this? Would
it then be acceptable to do a 16-byte aligned stack?

On the face of it it doesn't seem to be a huge amount of code
assuming they mostly live under arch/x86.

The problem is that we have nasties like TRACE_IRQS_OFF.  Performance
doesn't really matter for these macros, so we could probably rig up a
helper for forcibly align the stack there.  Maybe
FRAME_BEGIN_FORCE_ALIGN?  I also think I'd rather not to modify
pt_regs.  We should just fix the small number of code paths that
create a pt_regs and then call into C code to align the stack.

But if we can't do this with automatic verification, then I'm not sure
I want to do it at all.  The asm is already more precarious than I'd
like, and having a code path that is misaligned is asking for obscure
bugs down the road.

For the entry code, could we just replace all calls with CALL_ALIGNED?
That might be less intrusive than trying to adjust all the pt_regs
accesses.

Then to ensure that nobody ever uses 'call' directly:

  '#define call please-use-CALL-ALIGNED-instead-of-call'

I think that would be possible if CALL_ALIGNED were a ".macro".

To clarify, CALL_ALIGNED could be (completely untested):

.macro CALL_ALIGNED \func
	push	%rbp
	movq	%rsp, %rbp
	and	$0xfffffffffffffff0,%rsp
	call	\func
	movq	%rbp, %rsp
	pop	%rbp
.endm

-- 
Josh