Re: [RFC PATCH 05/28] x86: Define the stack protector guard symbol explicitly

Ard Biesheuvel
2024-10-04T13:15:36Z

On Sat, 28 Sept 2024 at 15:41, Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 2:33 PM Uros Bizjak <ubizjak@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 5:02 PM Ard Biesheuvel <ardb+git@google.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > From: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
> > >
> > > Specify the guard symbol for the stack cookie explicitly, rather than
> > > positioning it exactly 40 bytes into the per-CPU area. Doing so removes
> > > the need for the per-CPU region to be absolute rather than relative to
> > > the placement of the per-CPU template region in the kernel image, and
> > > this allows the special handling for absolute per-CPU symbols to be
> > > removed entirely.
> > >
> > > This is a worthwhile cleanup in itself, but it is also a prerequisite
> > > for PIE codegen and PIE linking, which can replace our bespoke and
> > > rather clunky runtime relocation handling.
> >
> > I would like to point out a series that converted the stack protector
> > guard symbol to a normal percpu variable [1], so there was no need to
> > assume anything about the location of the guard symbol.
> >
> > [1] "[PATCH v4 00/16] x86-64: Stack protector and percpu improvements"
> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240322165233.71698-1-brgerst@gmail.com/
> >
> > Uros.
>
> I plan on resubmitting that series sometime after the 6.12 merge
> window closes. As I recall from the last version, it was decided to
> wait until after the next LTS release to raise the minimum GCC version
> to 8.1 and avoid the need to be compatible with the old stack
> protector layout.
>

Hi Brian,

I'd be more than happy to compare notes on that - I wasn't aware of
your intentions here, or I would have reached out before sending this
RFC.

There are two things that you would need to address for Clang support
to work correctly:
- the workaround I cc'ed you on the other day [0],
- a workaround for the module loader so it tolerates the GOTPCRELX
relocations that Clang emits [1]

[0] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20241002092534.3163838-2-ardb+git@google.com/
[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ardb/linux.git/commit/?id=a18121aabbdd