linux-kernel - [BUG] bad uc_stack passed to signal handlers

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Date:	Tue, 22 May 2007 14:53:56 -0500
From:	Andrew Hastings <abh@...y.com>
To:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: [BUG] bad uc_stack passed to signal handlers

I'm experimenting with remapping the stack to hugepages.  I was hoping
to use the Posix getcontext, sigaltstack, and sigaction interfaces to do
this.  Unfortunately, the GNU/Linux implementations are not working as
specified by Posix.

Omitting error checks, here's what I'm doing:

    ucontext_t main_uc;

    main()
    {
	...
	getcontext(&main_uc);
	alt.ss_sp = malloc(alt.ss_size = SIGSTKSZ);
	alt.ss_flags = 0;
	sigaltstack(&alt, (stack_t *)0);
	sigemptyset(&set);
	act.sa_sigaction = handler;
	act.sa_mask = set;
	act.sa_flags = SA_ONSTACK|SA_SIGINFO;
	sigaction(SIGUSR1, &act, (struct sigaction *)0);
	raise(SIGUSR1);
    }

    void handler(int sig, siginfo_t *i, void *c)
    {
	ucontext_t *ucp = (ucontext_t *)c;
	...

According to Posix, ucp->uc_stack should "refer to the receiving
thread's context that was interrupted when the signal was delivered."

However, Linux always sets it to the sigaltstack.  (Even if SA_ONSTACK
was not specified, in which case ucp->uc_stack points to a stack that
has nothing to do with the running signal handler nor the context that
was active when the signal was received.)

FWIW, I ran on Linux 2.6.16.27-0.9-smp x86_64 and Linux
2.6.16.27-0.6-default i386, but the code is the same in linux-2.6.22-rc1
and all the architectures I inspected seem to have this same bug
in setup_rt_frame.

I was hoping to work around this with getcontext, but it appears to be 
incompletely implemented, and does not set the main_uc.uc_stack field.
There's a two-year-old bug report against glibc:
http://sources.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=759

Reading the Posix specification, I would expect the values inside
main_uc.uc_stack and ucp->uc_stack to be identifical.  Making Linux and
glibc agree on these values would probably require turning getcontext
into a system call.

-Andrew Hastings
 Cray Inc.
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