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

Luis Machado
2020-05-13T15:09:22Z

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.