On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 11:45:05AM -0500, YiFei Zhu wrote: > On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 10:04 PM YiFei Zhu <zhuyifei1999@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Why do the prepare here instead of during attach? (And note that it > > > should not be written to fail.) > > > > Right. > > During attach a spinlock (current->sighand->siglock) is held. Do we > really want to put the emulator in the "atomic section"? It's a good point, but I had some other ideas around it that lead to me a different conclusion. Here's what I've got in my head: I don't view filter attach (nor the siglock) as fastpath: the lock is rarely contested and the "long time" will only be during filter attach. When performing filter emulation, all the syscalls that are already marked as "must run filter" on the previous filter can be skipped for the new filter, since it cannot change the outcome, which makes the emulation step faster. The previous filter's bitmap isn't "stable" until siglock is held. If we do the emulation step before siglock, we have to always do full evaluation of all syscalls, and then merge the bitmap during attach. That means all filters ever attached will take maximal time to perform emulation. I prefer the idea of the emulation step taking advantage of the bitmap optimization, since the kernel spends less time doing work over the life of the process tree. It's certainly marginal, but it also lets all the bitmap manipulation stay in one place (as opposed to being split between "prepare" and "attach"). What do you think? -- Kees Cook
