On Thursday 16 August 2012, Will Deacon wrote: > On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 03:34:04PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > > On Tuesday 14 August 2012, Catalin Marinas wrote: > > > +asmlinkage int compat_sys_personality(compat_ulong_t personality) > > > +{ > > > + int ret; > > > + > > > + if (personality(current->personality) == PER_LINUX32 && > > > + personality == PER_LINUX) > > > + personality = PER_LINUX32; > > > + ret = sys_personality(personality); > > > + if (ret == PER_LINUX32) > > > + ret = PER_LINUX; > > > + return ret; > > > +} > > > > Where did you get this from? > > > > You should not need compat_sys_personality, just call the native function. > > Hmm, but in that case an aarch32 application doing a personality(PER_LINUX) > syscall will start seeing the wrong uname. Coming back at this topic, I noticed another issue. Jiri Kosina has recently posted patches to fix this function in the other architectures in order to mask out the other personality bits, which is a correct fix, but the above function is odd for other reasons. * On MIPS, it is used only for compat tasks, like you have it above. * On PA-RISC, it is used for native 32 bit tasks and for compat 32 bit tasks, but not for native 64 bit ones. * On IA64, it was used for compat tasks (support for which has since been removed from the kernel), plus all 32 bit tasks would start with PER_LINUX32. * On PowerPC, Sparc and s390, it is used for native 64 bit tasks and for compat 32 bit tasks, but not for native 32 bit ones. * On Tile, it was never used. * On x86_64, it used to be defined (copied from ia64) but not used throughout the git history. The semantics of the function are also interesting: The intention seems to be that to a compat task, PER_LINUX32 would appear as PER_LINUX. The effect is that any process can set PER_LINUX32 but it can never be unset except by a 64 bit MIPS or PA-RISC task. Since x86_64 does not implement this behavior at all, I suspect that there are now lots of things depending on not having it, while all the other architectures might also have some (even predating the x86_64 port) use cases that depend on depend on not being able to observe PER_LINUX32 in 32 bit compat tasks. I think we should try to agree on how this is all supposed to work and use common code, either put the ppc/sparc/s390 version into sys_personality, or remove all of them and just do what x86 and tile do, using the regular sys_personality for all tasks. Arnd -- 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