Re: [PATCH v9 23/42] Documentation/x86: Add CET shadow stack description

[Mark Brown]

On Wed, Jul 05, 2023 at 06:45:38PM +0000, Edgecombe, Rick P wrote:

> Looking at the docs Mark linked (thanks!), ARM has generic GCS PUSH and
> POP shadow stack instructions? Can ARM just push a restore token at
> setjmp time, like I was trying to figure out earlier with a push token
> arch_prctl? It would be good to understand how ARM is going to
> implement this with these differences in what is allowed by the HW.

> If there are differences in how locked down/functional the hardware
> implementations are, and if we want to have some unified set of rules
> for apps, there will need to some give and take. The x86 approach was
> mostly to not support all behaviors and ask apps to either change or
> not enable shadow stacks. We don't want one architecture to have to do
> a bunch of strange things, but we also don't want one to lose some key
> end user value.

GCS is all or nothing, either the hardware supports GCS or it doesn't.
There are finer grained hypervisor traps (see HFGxTR_EL2 in the system
registers) but they aren't intended to be used to disable partial
functionality and there's a strong chance we'd just disable the feature
in the face of such usage.  The kernel does have the option to control
which functionality is exposed to userspace, in particular we have
separate controls for use of the GCS, the push/pop instructions and the
store instructions (similarly to the control x86 has for WRSS).
Similarly to the handling of WRSS in your series my patches allow
userspace to choose which of these features are enabled.

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