Re: Bug report in the elf loader

[Jiri Kosina]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2008, Abel Bernabeu wrote:

> What is the official forum to report bugs in the kernel?

Hi Abel,

lkml is the most official forum you can find.

> I've making some testing of the elf loader in my host system (an x86
> PC with Linux version 2.6.18)... and I have finally found a bug.
> The elf loader does not always return the correct error code when
> trying to load incorrect binaries.
> The execution with 2 badly formed elf binaries leads to different error codes:
[ ... ]
> # ls ./bb386 ./bb386nc
> ./bb386  ./bb386nc  <------ Both files exist!!
> # ./execve ./bb386
> Executing ./bb386
> The result of exec is 2    <--------- Bad!!
> # ./execve ./bb386nc
> Executing ./bb386nc
> The result of exec is 8
> Execve should return 8 in both cases.
> I attach the two binaries so anyone familiar with the elf loader can
> try to figure out the problem... I can supply some details about how I
> produced the binaries if needed.

Well, bb386nc has its e_flags set to 0x2, which means that the binary is 
of type EF_BFIN_FDPIC.

The fdpic handler returns ENOENT if the PT_INTERP field of the binary is 
malformed, which is what you are probabling hitting here:

                        retval = -ENOENT;
                        if (interpreter_name[phdr->p_filesz - 1] != '\0')
                                goto error;

The 'standard' ELF binary handler returns ENOEXEC in such cases, and this 
is the difference you are seeing here.

I basically think that both errnos are allowed here:

ENOENT The file filename or a script or ELF interpreter does not exist, or 
a shared library needed for file or interpreter cannot be found.

ENOEXEC An executable is not in a recognized format, is for the wrong 
architecture, or has some other format error that means it cannot be 
executed.

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs
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