Re: [PATCH v2 23/39] x86: Introduce userspace API for CET enabling

Florian Weimer
2022-10-12T12:19:15Z

* Rick P. Edgecombe:

> On Mon, 2022-10-10 at 12:56 +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> > + /* Only support enabling/disabling one feature at a time. */
>> > + if (hweight_long(features) > 1)
>> > + return -EINVAL;
>>
>> This means we'll soon need three extra system calls for x86-64
>> process
>> start: SHSTK, IBT, and switching off vsyscall emulation. (The latter
>> does not need any special CPU support.)
>>
>> Maybe we can do something else instead to make the strace output a
>> little bit cleaner?
>
> In previous versions it supported enabling multiple features in a
> single syscall. Thomas Gleixner pointed out that (this was on the LAM
> patchset that shared the interface at the time) it makes the behavior
> of what to do when one feature fails to enable complicated:
>
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/87zgjjqico.ffs@tglx/

Can we return the bits for the features that were actually enabled?
Those three don't have cross-dependencies in the sense that you would
only use X & Y together, but not X or Y alone.

Thanks,
Florian