Re: [PATCH v11 25/25] x86/cet/shstk: Add arch_prctl functions for shadow stack

Dave Martin
2020-09-01T10:28:17Z

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 06:26:11AM -0700, H.J. Lu wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 12:57 PM Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 8/26/20 11:49 AM, Yu, Yu-cheng wrote:
> > >> I would expect things like Go and various JITs to call it directly.
> > >>
> > >> If we wanted to be fancy and add a potentially more widely useful
> > >> syscall, how about:
> > >>
> > >> mmap_special(void *addr, size_t length, int prot, int flags, int type);
> > >>
> > >> Where type is something like MMAP_SPECIAL_X86_SHSTK. Fundamentally,
> > >> this is really just mmap() except that we want to map something a bit
> > >> magical, and we don't want to require opening a device node to do it.
> > >
> > > One benefit of MMAP_SPECIAL_* is there are more free bits than MAP_*.
> > > Does ARM have similar needs for memory mapping, Dave?
> >
> > No idea.
> >
> > But, mmap_special() is *basically* mmap2() with extra-big flags space.
> > I suspect it will grow some more uses on top of shadow stacks. It could
> > have, for instance, been used to allocate MPX bounds tables.
>
> There is no reason we can't use
>
> long arch_prctl (int, unsigned long, unsigned long, unsigned long, ..);
>
> for ARCH_X86_CET_MMAP_SHSTK. We just need to use
>
> syscall (SYS_arch_prctl, ARCH_X86_CET_MMAP_SHSTK, ...);

For arm64 (and sparc etc.) we continue to use the regular mmap/mprotect
family of calls. One or two additional arch-specific mmap flags are
sufficient for now.

Is x86 definitely not going to fit within those calls?

For now, I can't see what arg[2] is used for (and hence the type
argument of mmap_special()), but I haven't dug through the whole series.

Cheers
---Dave