Re: remove set_fs calls from the coredump code v6

Eric W. Biederman
2020-05-05T20:32:20Z

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

> On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 3:13 AM Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> wrote:
>>
>> this series gets rid of playing with the address limit in the exec and
>> coredump code. Most of this was fairly trivial, the biggest changes are
>> those to the spufs coredump code.
>
> Ack, nice, and looks good.
>
> The only part I dislike is how we have that 'struct compat_siginfo' on
> the stack, which is a huge waste (most of it is the nasty padding to
> 128 bytes).
>
> But that's not new, I only reacted to it because the code moved a bit.
> We cleaned up the regular siginfo to not have the padding in the
> kernel (and by "we" I mean "Eric Biederman did it after some prodding
> as part of his siginfo cleanups" - see commit 4ce5f9c9e754 "signal:
> Use a smaller struct siginfo in the kernel"), and I wonder if we
> could do something similar with that compat thing.
>
> 128 bytes of wasted kernel stack isn't the end of the world, but it's
> sad when the *actual* data is only 32 bytes or so.

We probably can. After introducing a kernel_compat_siginfo that is
the size that userspace actually would need.

It isn't something I want to mess with until this code gets merged, as I
think the set_fs cleanups are more important.

Christoph made some good points about how ugly the #ifdefs are in
the generic copy_siginfo_to_user32 implementation.

I am thinking the right fix is to introduce.
- TS_X32 as a companion to TS_COMPAT in the x86_64.
- Modify in_x32_syscall() to test TS_X32
- Implement x32_copy_siginfo_to_user32 that forces TS_X32 to be
set. AKA:

x32_copy_siginfo_to_user32()
{
unsigned long state = current_thread_info()->state;
current_thread_info()->state |= TS_X32;
copy_siginfo_to_user32();
current_thread_info()->state = state;
}

That would make the #ifdefs go away, but I don't yet know what the x86
maintainers would say about that scheme. I think it is a good path as
it would isolate the runtime cost of that weird SIGCHLD siginfo format
to just x32. Then ia32 in compat mode would not need to pay.

Once I get that then it will be easier to introduce a yet another helper
of copy_siginfo_to_user32 that generates just the kernel_compat_siginfo
part, and the two visible derivatives can call memset and clear_user
to clear the unset parts.

I am assuming you don't don't mind having a full siginfo in
elf_note_info that ultimately gets copied into the core dump?

Eric