On Sun, 6 Dec 2009, Hugh Dickins wrote: > > I've never found out why we need access_process_vm() to expand a stack: > shall we see what breaks if we just forbid expand_stack() on another mm? Hmm. If you want to actually emulate some stack instruction using ptrace, you'd need to be able to extend the stack. The classic example of this might be to do some crazy user-space emulation of 'pushf' for virtualization. And emulating pushf is not theory: at least KVM does actually do exactly that (although KVM obviously does it from kernel space and from within the process that faulted). Same goes for vm86 mode (again, we do that emulation in kernel) and for ptrace single-stepping (which we actually don't bother emulating). The point being that at least 'pushf' really _is_ an instruction that (a) might want to extend the stack and (b) does tend to need emulation or fixup in some virtualized/emulated environments. I just don't know if you actually ever have user space doing so. But I could imagine that Wine does some pushf emulation using ptrace, for example. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
