On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 12:38 PM H.J. Lu [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 11:56 AM Andy Lutomirski [off-list ref] wrote:

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On Aug 27, 2020, at 11:13 AM, Yu, Yu-cheng [off-list ref] wrote:

On 8/27/2020 6:36 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:

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* H. J. Lu:

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On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 6:19 AM Florian Weimer [off-list ref] wrote:

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* Dave Martin:

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You're right that this has implications: for i386, libc probably pulls
more arguments off the stack than are really there in some situations.
This isn't a new problem though.  There are already generic prctls with
fewer than 4 args that are used on x86.

As originally posted, glibc prctl would have to know that it has to pull
an u64 argument off the argument list for ARCH_X86_CET_DISABLE.  But
then the u64 argument is a problem for arch_prctl as well.

Argument of ARCH_X86_CET_DISABLE is int and passed in register.

The commit message and the C source say otherwise, I think (not sure
about the C source, not a kernel hacker).

H.J. Lu suggested that we fix x86 arch_prctl() to take four arguments, and then keep MMAP_SHSTK as an arch_prctl().  Because now the map flags and size are all in registers, this also solves problems being pointed out earlier.  Without a wrapper, the shadow stack mmap call (from user space) will be:

syscall(_NR_arch_prctl, ARCH_X86_CET_MMAP_SHSTK, size, MAP_32BIT).

I admit I don’t see a show stopping technical reason we can’t add arguments to an existing syscall, but I’m pretty sure it’s unprecedented, and it doesn’t seem like a good idea.

prctl prototype is:

extern int prctl (int __option, ...)

and implemented in kernel as:

      int prctl(int option, unsigned long arg2, unsigned long arg3,
                 unsigned long arg4, unsigned long arg5);

Not all prctl operations take all 5 arguments.   It also applies
to arch_prctl.  It is quite normal for different operations of
arch_prctl to take different numbers of arguments.

If by "quite normal" you mean "does not happen", then I agree.

In any event, I will not have anything to do with a patch that changes
an existing syscall signature unless Linus personally acks it.  So if
you want to email him and linux-abi, be my guest.