On Wednesday 22 April 2009 20:01:44 David Daney wrote:
> Kevin D. Kissell wrote:
> > David Daney wrote:
> >> This is a preliminary patch to add a vdso to all user processes.
> >> Still missing are ELF headers and .eh_frame information. But it is
> >> enough to allow us to move signal trampolines off of the stack.
> >>
> >> We allocate a single page (the vdso) and write all possible signal
> >> trampolines into it. The stack is moved down by one page and the vdso
> >> is mapped into this space.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: David Daney <ddaney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > Note that for FPU-less CPUs, the kernel FP emulator also uses a user
> > stack trampoline to execute instructions in the delay slots of emulated
> > FP branches. I didn't see any of the math-emu modules being tweaked in
> > either part of your patch. Presumably, one would want to move that
> > operation into the vdso as well.
Kevin,
As David says, this is a Very Ugly Problem. Each FP trampoline
is effectively per-(runtime-)instance per-thread, i.e., there is
a unique FP trampoline for every dynamic instance of (non-trivial
non-FP) instruction in an FP delay slot. This is essentially the
complete opposite of the signal-return trampoline, which is fixed
(constant text) for all instances in all threads.
As such, David's vdso (assuming it's similar to those on other
architectures (I've not looked at it closely yet)) may not have
any obvious role to play in moving the FP trampoline('s code?)
off the user's stack.
>[ ... ]
> It is an ugly problem. I am trying to hack something up to fix it.
>
> David Daney
David,
Since we are massively interested in what all this is leading
to (no-execute stacks using the XI bit), I'm very happy to help
(time permitting — I've got an overflowing list of other stuff).
We make a 32-bit 4KSd-based SoC (Innova Card (now Maxim) USIP),
albeit the latest kernel we have running ATM is 2.6.25 (soon, I
hope, to be 2.6.26(.1 at least?)). I'll be trying your patches
(presumably by backporting) as soon as I can (see: overflowing
list.... ;-\ ).
cheers!
-blf-
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