Re: [PATCH] arm64: Preserve the user r/w register tpidr_el0 on context switch and fork in compat mode

Will Deacon
2015-05-05T17:15:58Z

On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 06:09:57PM +0100, André Hentschel wrote:
> Am 05.05.2015 um 12:51 schrieb Will Deacon:
> > On Sun, May 03, 2015 at 05:24:18PM +0100, André Hentschel wrote:
> >> From: André Hentschel <nerv@dawncrow.de>
> >>
> >> Since commit a4780adeefd042482f624f5e0d577bf9cdcbb760 the user writeable TLS
> >> register on ARM is preserved per thread.
> >>
> >> This patch does it analogous to the ARM patch, but for compat mode on ARM64.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: André Hentschel <nerv@dawncrow.de>
> >> Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
> >> Cc: Jonathan Austin <jonathan.austin@arm.com>
> >>
> >> ---
> >> This patch is against Linux 4.1-rc1 (b787f68c36d49bb1d9236f403813641efa74a031)
> >
> > Curious, but why do you need this? iirc, we added this for arch/arm/ because
> > of some windows rt (?) emulation in wine. Is that still the case here and is
> > anybody actually using that?
>
> Yes, Windows ARM binaries are the well known use case, but also the compat
> mode should do what the arm kernel is doing I’d think and the code wasn't
> adjusted yet.

Sure, I was just curious.

> What i'm curious about is why the main TLS register on arm64 is the user
> writeable, I'm not an security expert but this looks odd. I could easily
> provoke a crash by writing to it...

You've probably got the wrong TLS. Allowing a program to clobber it's own
thread-local storage is no worse than allowing it to write to its general
purpose registers, pc, etc.

I'm assuming the crash you saw was just a userspace crash, rather than
the kernel?

Will