[PATCH v4 7/7] x86/boot: Reject absolute references in .head.text

Ard Biesheuvel
2024-12-05T11:28:37Z

From: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>

The .head.text section used to contain asm code that bootstrapped the
page tables and switched to the kernel virtual address space before
executing C code. The asm code carefully avoided dereferencing absolute
symbol references, as those will fault before the page tables are
installed.

Today, the .head.text section contains lots of C code too, and getting
the compiler to reason about absolute addresses taken from, e.g.,
section markers such as _text[] or _end[] but never use such absolute
references to access global variables [*] is intractible.

So instead, forbid the use of absolute references in .head.text
entirely, and rely on explicit arithmetic involving VA-to-PA offsets
generated by the asm startup code to construct virtual addresses where
needed (e.g., to construct the page tables).

Note that the 'relocs' tool is only used on the core kernel image when
building a relocatable image, but this is the default, and so adding the
check there is sufficient to catch new occurrences of code that use
absolute references before the kernel mapping is up.

[*] it is feasible when using PIC codegen but there is strong pushback
to using this for all of the core kernel, and using it only for
.head.text is not straight-forward.

Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
---
arch/x86/tools/relocs.c | 8 +++++++-
1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/arch/x86/tools/relocs.c b/arch/x86/tools/relocs.c
index 27441e5863b2..e937be979ec8 100644
--- a/arch/x86/tools/relocs.c
+++ b/arch/x86/tools/relocs.c
@@ -841,10 +841,10 @@ static int is_percpu_sym(ElfW(Sym) *sym, const char *symname)
static int do_reloc64(struct section *sec, Elf_Rel *rel, ElfW(Sym) *sym,
const char *symname)
{
+ int headtext = !strcmp(sec_name(sec->shdr.sh_info), ".head.text");
unsigned r_type = ELF64_R_TYPE(rel->r_info);
ElfW(Addr) offset = rel->r_offset;
int shn_abs = (sym->st_shndx == SHN_ABS) && !is_reloc(S_REL, symname);
-
if (sym->st_shndx == SHN_UNDEF)
return 0;

@@ -900,6 +900,12 @@ static int do_reloc64(struct section *sec, Elf_Rel *rel, ElfW(Sym) *sym,
break;
}

+ if (headtext) {
+ die("Absolute reference to symbol '%s' not permitted in .head.text\n",
+ symname);
+ break;
+ }
+
/*
* Relocation offsets for 64 bit kernels are output
* as 32 bits and sign extended back to 64 bits when
--
2.47.0.338.g60cca15819-goog