Re: [RFC PATCH v2 6/6] prctl.2: Add tagged address ABI control prctls (arm64)

[Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas-5wv7dgnIgG8@public.gmane.org>]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 05:42:09PM +0100, Dave P Martin wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 04:26:34PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 11:06:42AM +0100, Dave P Martin wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jun 09, 2020 at 06:22:32PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > > On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 10:17:38PM +0100, Dave P Martin wrote:
> > > > > +.IP
> > > > > +The level of support is selected by
> > > > > +.IR "(unsigned int) arg2" ,
> > > > 
> > > > We use (unsigned long) for arg2.
> > > 
> > > Hmmm, not quite sure how I came up with unsigned int here.  I'll just
> > > drop this: the type in the prctl() prototype is unsigned long anyway.
> > > 
> > > The type is actually moot in this case, since the valid values all fit
> > > in an unsigned int.
> > 
> > Passing an int doesn't require that the top 32-bit of the long are
> > zeroed (in case anyone writes the low-level SVC by hand).
> 
> Fair point, I was forgetting that wrinkle.  Anyway, the convention in
> this page seems to be that if the type is unsigned long, we don't
> mention it, because the prctl() prototype says that already.
> 
> Question: the glibc prototype for prctl is variadic, so surely any
> calls that don't explicitly cast the args to unsigned long are already
> theoretically broken?  The #defines (and 0) are all implicitly int.
> This probably affects lots of prctls.
> 
> We may get away with it because the compiler is almost certainly going
> to favour a mov over a ldr for getting small integers into regs, and mov
> <Wd> fortunately zeroes the top bits for us anyway.

So does LDR Wd.

Anyway, I think glibc (or my reading of it) has something like like:

  register long _x1 asm ("x1") = _x1tmp;

before invoking the SVC. I assume this would do the right conversion to
long. I can't tell about other libraries but I'd say it's their
responsibility to convert the args to long before calling the kernel's
prctl().

-- 
Catalin