Re: i686 quirk for AMD Geode

Pavel Machek
2009-11-11T08:17:30Z

Hi!

> > >>> *THIS* is the kind of complexity that makes me think that having a
> > >>> single source for all interpretation done in the kernel is the
> > >>> preferred option.
> > >>
> > >> Definitely agreed ... The NX code is quite a maze right now, so changes
> > >> to it should come generously laced with cleanups.
> > >
> > > BTW, I don't see why we should be impacted by NX. Trying to
> > > execute from an NX page would return a SEGV, not SIGILL, so
> > > we should not be bothered, am I wrong ?
> >
> > Yes. Consider a page-crossing instruction.
>
> OK, but to be pragmatic, NX is there to prevent execution of
> instructions in the stack (or heap) during buffer overflows.
> If we only implement the few instructions lised in previous
> mail, there is very little benefit to check for NX :
>
> - those instructions cannot jump to other code, they just
> change one register or memory location at most (or just nop)
>
> - once we return from the signal handler, if we have crossed
> a NX page boundary, the program will segfault anyway, taking
> with it the change we just completed.
>
> - last, the probability of having an NX page just after an
> executable one seems too tight to me to even constitute
> an attack vector ! BTW, I'm not even certain that all CPUs
> correctly implement this check !

Yes, you can probably "get away" with it. But I would not want to
debug problems on systems with half-instruction-emulation. Please do
it right, or not at all.

> So in short, I think we could reasonably implement CMOV/NOPL
> with the instruction length control, with getuser for data
> accesses but without checking the code pages permissions if
> we know that the CPU could already fetch the beginning of
> the instruction correctly to cause an invalid opcode trap.
>
> I'm not saying this is perfect, just that this is reasonable.

Reasonable hack to get distro booting yes. Reasonable for mainline?
No.
Pavel

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