Re: [PATCH v3 19/23] arm64: mte: Add PTRACE_{PEEK,POKE}MTETAGS support

Luis Machado
2020-05-18T17:12:24Z

On 5/18/20 1:47 PM, Dave Martin wrote:
> On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 01:45:27PM -0300, Luis Machado wrote:
>> On 5/13/20 12:09 PM, Luis Machado wrote:
>>> On 5/13/20 11:11 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
>>>> On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 09:52:52AM -0300, Luis Machado wrote:
>>>>> On 5/13/20 7:48 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 04:05:15PM -0300, Luis Machado wrote:
>>>>>>> On 4/21/20 11:25 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
>>>>>>>> Add support for bulk setting/getting of the MTE tags in a tracee's
>>>>>>>> address space at 'addr' in the ptrace() syscall prototype.
>>>>>>>> 'data' points
>>>>>>>> to a struct iovec in the tracer's address space with iov_base
>>>>>>>> representing the address of a tracer's buffer of length iov_len. The
>>>>>>>> tags to be copied to/from the tracer's buffer are stored as one
>>>>>>>> tag per
>>>>>>>> byte.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On successfully copying at least one tag, ptrace() returns 0 and
>>>>>>>> updates
>>>>>>>> the tracer's iov_len with the number of tags copied. In case of
>>>>>>>> error,
>>>>>>>> either -EIO or -EFAULT is returned, trying to follow the ptrace() man
>>>>>>>> page.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Note that the tag copying functions are not performance critical,
>>>>>>>> therefore they lack optimisations found in typical memory copy
>>>>>>>> routines.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Signed-off-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
>>>>>>>> Cc: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
>>>>>>>> Cc: Alan Hayward <Alan.Hayward@arm.com>
>>>>>>>> Cc: Luis Machado <luis.machado@linaro.org>
>>>>>>>> Cc: Omair Javaid <omair.javaid@linaro.org>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I started working on MTE support for GDB and I'm wondering if
>>>>>>> we've already
>>>>>>> defined a way to check for runtime MTE support (as opposed to a
>>>>>>> HWCAP2-based
>>>>>>> check) in a traced process.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Originally we were going to do it via empty-parameter ptrace
>>>>>>> calls, but you
>>>>>>> had mentioned something about a proc-based method, if I'm not
>>>>>>> mistaken.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We could expose more information via proc_pid_arch_status() but that
>>>>>> would be the tagged address ABI and tag check fault mode and intended
>>>>>> for human consumption mostly. We don't have any ptrace interface that
>>>>>> exposes HWCAPs. Since the gdbserver runs on the same machine as the
>>>>>> debugged process, it can check the HWCAPs itself, they are the same for
>>>>>> all processes.
>>>>>
>>>>> Sorry, I think i haven't made it clear. I already have access to
>>>>> HWCAP2 both
>>>> >from GDB's and gdbserver's side. But HWCAP2 only indicates the
>>>>> availability
>>>>> of a particular feature in a CPU, it doesn't necessarily means the
>>>>> traced
>>>>> process is actively using MTE, right?
>>>>
>>>> Right, but "actively" is not well defined either. The only way to tell
>>>> whether a process is using MTE is to look for any PROT_MTE mappings. You
>>>> can access these via /proc/<pid>/maps. In theory, one can use MTE
>>>> without enabling the tagged address ABI or even tag checking (i.e. no
>>>> prctl() call).
>>>>
>>>
>>> I see the problem. I was hoping for a more immediate form of runtime
>>> check. One debuggers would validate and enable all the tag checks and
>>> register access at process attach/startup.
>>>
>>> With that said, checking for PROT_MTE in /proc/<pid>/maps may still be
>>> useful, but a process with no immediate PROT_MTE maps doesn't mean such
>>> process won't attempt to use PROT_MTE later on. I'll have to factor that
>>> in, but I think it'll work.
>>>
>>> I guess HWCAP2_MTE will be useful after all. We can just assume that
>>> whenever we have HWCAP2_MTE, we can fetch MTE registers and check for
>>> PROT_MTE.
>>>
>>>>> So GDB/gdbserver would need runtime checks to be able to tell if a
>>>>> process
>>>>> is using MTE, in which case the tools will pay attention to tags and
>>>>> additional MTE-related registers (sctlr and gcr) we plan to make
>>>>> available
>>>>> to userspace.
>>>>
>>>> I'm happy to expose GCR_EL1.Excl and the SCTLR_EL1.TCF0 bits via ptrace
>>>> as a thread state. The tags, however, are a property of the memory range
>>>> rather than a per-thread state. That's what makes it different from
>>>> other register-based features like SVE.
>>>
>>> That's my understanding as well. I'm assuming, based on our previous
>>> discussion, that we'll have those couple registers under a regset (maybe
>>> NT_ARM_MTE).
>>>
>>>>
>>>>> The original proposal was to have GDB send PTRACE_PEEKMTETAGS with a
>>>>> NULL
>>>>> address and check the result. Then GDB would be able to decide if the
>>>>> process is using MTE or not.
>>>>
>>>> We don't store this information in the kernel as a bool and I don't
>>>> think it would be useful either. I think gdb, when displaying memory,
>>>> should attempt to show tags as well if the corresponding range was
>>>> mapped with PROT_MTE. Just probing whether a thread ever used MTE
>>>> doesn't help since you need to be more precise on which address supports
>>>> tags.
>>>
>>> Thanks for making this clear. Checking with ptrace won't work then. It
>>> seems like /proc/<pid>/maps is the way to go.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> BTW, in my pre-v4 patches (hopefully I'll post v4 this week), I changed
>>>>>> the ptrace tag access slightly to return an error (and no tags copied)
>>>>>> if the page has not been mapped with PROT_MTE. The other option would
>>>>>> have been read-as-zero/write-ignored as per the hardware behaviour.
>>>>>> Either option is fine by me but I thought the write-ignored part would
>>>>>> be more confusing for the debugger. If you have any preference here,
>>>>>> please let me know.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think erroring out is a better alternative, as long as the debugger
>>>>> can
>>>>> tell what the error means, like, for example, "this particular address
>>>>> doesn't make use of tags".
>>>>
>>>> And you could use this for probing whether the range has tags or not.
>>>> With my current patches it returns -EFAULT but happy to change this to
>>>> -EOPNOTSUPP or -EINVAL. Note that it only returns an error if no tags
>>>> copied. If gdb asks for a range of two pages and only the first one has
>>>> PROT_MTE, it will return 0 and set the number of tags copied equivalent
>>>> to the first page. A subsequent call would return an error.
>>>>
>>>> In my discussion with Dave on the documentation patch, I thought retries
>>>> wouldn't be needed but in the above case it may be useful to get an
>>>> error code. That's unless we change the interface to return an error and
>>>> also update the user iovec structure.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Let me think about this for a bit. I'm trying to factor in the
>>> /proc/<pid>/maps contents. If debuggers know which pages have PROT_MTE
>>> set, then we can teach the tools not to PEEK/POKE tags from/to those
>>> memory ranges, which simplifies the error handling a bit.
>>
>> I was checking the output of /proc/<pid>/maps and it doesn't seem to contain
>> flags against which i can match PROT_MTE. It seems /proc/<pid>/smaps is the
>> one that contains the flags (mt) for MTE. Am i missing something?
>>
>> Is this the only place debuggers can check for PROT_MTE? If so, that's
>> unfortunate. /proc/<pid>/smaps doesn't seem to be convenient for parsing.
>
> Does the /proc approach work for gdbserver?

gdbserver also has access to /proc and reads memory from there
(/proc/<pid>/mem.

>
> For the SVE ptrace interface we eventually went with existence of the
> NT_ARM_SVE regset as being the canonical way of detecting whether SVE is
> present.

Do you mean "present" as in "this process is actively using SVE
registers" or do you mean the CPU and kernel support SVE, but there's no
guarantee SVE is being used?

From what i remember, SVE runtime usage check is based on header data
returned by the NT_ARM_SVE regset.

Right now i have a HWCAP2_MTE check for MTE. And for GDB, having
HWCAP2_MTE implies having the NT_ARM_MTE regset.

>
> As has been discussed here, I think we probably do want to expose the
> current MTE config for a thread via a new regset. Without this, I can't
> see how the debugger can know for sure what's going on.

What kind of information would the debugger be looking for in those
registers (sctlr and gcr)? Can MTE be switched on/off via those registers?

>
>
> Wrinkle: just because MTE is "off", pages might still be mapped with
> PROT_MTE and have arbitrary tags set on them, and the debugger perhaps
> needs a way to know that. Currently grubbing around in /proc is the
> only way to discover that. Dunno whether it matters.

That is the sort of thing that may confused the debugger.

If MTE is "off" (and thus the debugger doesn't need to validate tags),
then the pages mapped with PROT_MTE that show up in /proc/<pid>/smaps
should be ignored?

I'm looking for a precise way to tell if MTE is being used or not for a
particular process/thread. This, in turn, will tell debuggers when to
look for PROT_MTE mappings in /proc/<pid>/smaps and when to validate
tagged addresses.

So far my assumption was that MTE will always be "on" when HWCAP2_MTE is
present. So having HWCAP2_MTE means we have the NT_ARM_MTE regset and
that PROT_MTE pages have to be checked.