Re: [PATCH v17 18/23] platform/x86: Intel SGX driver

[Jarkko Sakkinen]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 11:25:47AM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 11:17 AM Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On 12/17/18 11:12 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > > So I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it the way you are now, but I
> > > do think that the changelog or at least some emails should explain
> > > *why* the enclave needs to keep a pointer to the creating process's
> > > mm.  And, if you do keep the current model, it would be nice to
> > > understand what happens if you do something awful like mremap()ing an
> > > enclave, or calling madvise on it, or otherwise abusing the vma.  Or
> > > doing fork(), for that matter.
> >
> > Yeah, the code is built to have one VMA and only one VMA per enclave.
> > You need to go over the origin of this restriction and what enforces this.
> 
> There is a sad historical reason that you may regret keeping this
> restriction.  There are plenty of pieces of code out there that think
> it's reasonable to spawn a subprocess by calling fork() and then
> execve().  (This is *not* a sensible thing to do.  One should use
> posix_spawn() or some CLONE_VM variant.  But even fairly recent
> posix_spawn() implementations will fork().  So the driver has to do
> *something* sensible on fork() or a bunch of things that use SGX
> unsuspectingly via, for example, PKCS #11, are going to be very sad.
> I suppose you could make enclaves just not show up in the fork()ed
> children, but then you have a different problem: creating an enclave
> and then doing daemon() won't work.
> 
> Yes, POSIX traditions are rather silly.

ATM enclave VMAs are not copied on fork. Not sure how you would
implement COW semantics with enclaves.

/Jarkko