Re: pt_regs leak into userspace (was Re: [PATCH v3 20/71] ARC: Signalhandling)

[Vineet Gupta]

On Monday 11 February 2013 04:23 PM, Jonas Bonn wrote:
> On 11 February 2013 11:28, James Hogan <james.hogan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 11/02/13 10:13, Vineet Gupta wrote:
>>> On Monday 11 February 2013 03:06 PM, Jonas Bonn wrote:
>>>> On 11 February 2013 08:26, Vineet Gupta <Vineet.Gupta1@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The only downside of this patch is that userspace signal stack grows in size,
>>>>> since signal frame only cares about scratch regs (pt_regs), but has to accommodate
>>>>> unused placeholder for callee regs too by virtue of using user_regs_struct.
>>>> Is this really true?  Don't setcontext and friends require that _all_
>>>> the registers be part of sigcontext?
>>>
>>> But for an ABI - callee saved regs will anyhow be saved/restored even in
>>> setcontext case ! So collecting it for that purpose seems useless, or am I missing
>>> something here.
>>
>> I think Jonas' point was that signals are asynchronous, i.e. you could
>> get interrupted by a signal at virtually any time during the program's
>> execution.
> 
> No, I agree that the callee-saved regs don't need to be saved across a
> signal handler invocation.  It's really just the setcontext case that
> wants to be able to swap out the callee-saved regs.

I don't think that's needed either - and if thats mandated somewhere, it would
seem a unnecessary mis-optimization IMHO.

See, even a setcontext enabled control flow needs to be ABI compliant so that it
plays nicely with other normal flows of execution. Thus e.g. it can't fudge a
callee reg - it needs to save orig callee reg(s) and restore them in the end. And
if we agree to those semantics - I don't see any value in swapping the callee reg
context around usage of setcontext as it would be a wasted effort.

-Vineet
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/