Re: [systemd-devel] BTI interaction between seccomp filters in systemd and glibc mprotect calls, causing service failures

Florian Weimer
2020-10-22T08:25:37Z

* Topi Miettinen:

>> The dynamic loader has to process the LOAD segments to get to the ELF
>> note that says to enable BTI. Maybe we could do a first pass and
>> load only the segments that cover notes. But that requires lots of
>> changes to generic code in the loader.
>
> What if the loader always enabled BTI for PROT_EXEC pages, but then
> when discovering that this was a mistake, mprotect() the pages without
> BTI?

Is that architecturally supported? How costly is the mprotect change if
the pages have not been faulted in yet?

> Then both BTI and MDWX would work and the penalty of not getting
> MDWX would fall to non-BTI programs. What's the expected proportion of
> BTI enabled code vs. disabled in the future, is it perhaps expected
> that a distro would enable the flag globally so eventually only a few
> legacy programs might be unprotected?

Eventually, I expect that mainstream distributions build everything for
BTI, so yes, the PROT_BTI removal would only be needed for legacy
programs.

Thanks,
Florian
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