Re: At what instant process starts using kernel stack ?

["Steven Zhou" <lullaby2005@xxxxxxxxx>]

from ULK:

Hardware Handling of Interrupts and Exceptions

We now describe how the CPU control unit handles interrupts and exceptions. We assume that the kernel has been initialized, and thus the CPU is operating in Protected Mode.

After executing an instruction, the cs and eip pair of registers contain the logical address of the next instruction to be executed. Before dealing with that instruction, the control unit checks whether an interrupt or an exception occurred while the control unit executed the previous instruction. If one occurred, the control unit does the following:

1. Determines the vector i associated with the interrupt or the exception.

2. Reads the i th entry of the IDT referred by the idtr register (we assume in the following description that the entry contains an interrupt or a trap gate).

3. Gets the base address of the GDT from the gdtr register and looks in the GDT to read the Segment Descriptor identified by the selector in the IDT entry. This descriptor specifies the base address of the segment that includes the interrupt or exception handler.

4. Makes sure the interrupt was issued by an authorized source. First, it compares the Current Privilege Level (CPL), which is stored in the two least significant bits of the cs register, with the Descriptor Privilege Level (DPL ) of the Segment Descriptor included in the GDT. Raises a "General protection " exception if the CPL is lower than the DPL, because the interrupt handler cannot have a lower privilege than the program that caused the interrupt. For programmed exceptions, makes a further security check: compares the CPL with the DPL of the gate descriptor included in the IDT and raises a "General protection" exception if the DPL is lower than the CPL. This last check makes it possible to prevent access by user applications to specific trap or interrupt gates.

5. Checks whether a change of privilege level is taking place that is, if CPL is different from the selected Segment Descriptor's DPL. If so, the control unit must start using the stack that is associated with the new privilege level. It does this by performing the following steps:

   1. Reads the tr register to access the TSS segment of the running process.

   2. Loads the ss and esp registers with the proper values for the stack segment and stack pointer associated with the new privilege level. These values are found in the TSS 

   3. In the new stack, it saves the previous values of ss and esp, which define the logical address of the stack associated with the old privilege level.

6. If a fault has occurred, it loads cs and eip with the logical address of the instruction that caused the exception so that it can be executed again.

7. Saves the contents of eflags , cs, and eip in the stack.

8. If the exception carries a hardware error code, it saves it on the stack.

9. Loads cs and eip, respectively, with the Segment Selector and the Offset fields of the Gate Descriptor stored in the i th entry of the IDT. These values define the logical address of the first instruction of the interrupt or exception handler.

PLEASE notice the point  5.b

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 4:43 PM, Mayuresh <infinite.questions@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A process has both user space stack and kernel space stack. When a system call happens, all parameters are either copied to stack or in registers and using exception it switches to kernel. As from asmlinkage, I understand parameters are passed onto stack. So once in kernel space, all parameters are poped from stack, which is user stack.

My query is when does a process starts using kernel stack ?

--
Best Regards.