Re: [PATCH v4 03/36] arm64/gcs: Document the ABI for Guarded Control Stacks

[Mark Brown]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 05:49:51PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 08:38:02PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:

> > > stack and pass the pointer/size to clone3()? It saves us from having to
> > > guess what the right size we'd need. struct clone_args is extensible.

> > I can't recall or locate the specific reasoning there right now, perhaps
> > Rick or someone else can?  I'd guess there would be compat concerns for
> > things that don't go via libc which would complicate the story with
> > identifying and marking things as GCS/SS safe, it's going to be more
> > robust to just supply a GCS if the process is using it.  That said
> > having a default doesn't preclude us using the extensibility to allow
> > userspace directly to control the GCS size, I would certainly be in
> > favour of adding support for that.

> It would be good if someone provided a summary of the x86 decision (I'll
> get to those thread but most likely in September). I think we concluded
> that we can't deploy GCS entirely transparently, so we need a libc
> change (apart from the ELF annotations). Since libc is opting in to GCS,

Right, we need changes for setjmp()/longjmp() for example.

> we could also update the pthread_create() etc. to allocate the shadow
> together with the standard stack.

> Anyway, that's my preference but maybe there were good reasons not to do
> this.

Yeah, it'd be good to understand.  I've been through quite a lot of old
versions of the x86 series (I've not found them all, there's 30 versions
or something of the old series plus the current one is on v9) and the
code always appears to have been this way with changelogs that explain
the what but not the why.  For example roughly the current behaviour was
already in place in v10 of the original series:

   https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200429220732.31602-26-yu-cheng.yu@xxxxxxxxx/

I do worry about the story for users calling the underlying clone3() API
(or legacy clone() for that matter) directly, and we would also need to
handle the initial GCS enable via prctl() - that's not insurmountable,
we could add a size argument there that only gets interpreted during the
initial enable for example.

My sense is that they deployment story is going to be smoother with
defaults being provided since it avoids dealing with the issue of what
to do if userspace creates a thread without a GCS in a GCS enabled
process but like I say I'd be totally happy to extend clone3().  I will
put some patches together for that (probably once the x86 stuff lands).
Given the size of this series it might be better split out for
manageability if nothing else.

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