Re: [PATCH v9 00/24] ILP32 for ARM64
From: Eugene Syromiatnikov <hidden>
Date: 2018-10-13 02:07:24
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linux-api, linux-arch, linux-arm-kernel, lkml
On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 03:39:07PM +0100, Szabolcs Nagy wrote:
On 10/10/18 15:10, Eugene Syromiatnikov wrote:quoted
* What's the reasoning behind capping syscall arguments to 32 bit? x32 and MIPS N32 do not have such a restriction (and do not need special wrappers for syscalls that pass 64-bit values as a result, except when they do, as it is the case for preadv2 on x32); moreover, that would lead to insurmountable difficulties for AArch64 ILP32 tracers that try to trace LP64 tracees, as it would be impossible to pass 64-bit addresses to process_vm_{read,write} or ptrace PEEK/POKE.but that's necessarily the case for all ilp32 abis: the userspace syscall function receives 32bit arguments so even if the kernel abi takes 64bit args you cannot use that from c code. (the libc does not even know which args should be sign or zero extended.)
glibc's syscall() prototype has kernel_ulong_t as its arguments (more specifically, to __syscall_ulong_t, which is 64-bit wide on x32; it should also have kernel_long_t as its return type instead of long, but that's another story), so it works perfectly fine in case of x32.
process_vm_readv/writev is limited by the ilp32 iovec struct, not by the syscall arguments.
Right, on x32/N32 this issue is worked around by the usage of the respective x86_64/N64 call, and it looks like another thing that is impossible with AArch64 ilp32.
ptrace is specified to take void* addr argument, and void* is 32bit on all ilp32 targets. so again on the c language level there is no way around the 32bit limitation.
Which is an issue.