linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH v9 for 4.15 01/14] Restartable sequences system call

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Message-ID: <19edaac0-98d7-e7a0-aceb-b861a2befce4@redhat.com>
Date:   Fri, 13 Oct 2017 14:50:13 +0200
From:   Florian Weimer <fweimer@...hat.com>
To:     Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@...icios.com>,
        "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@...il.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Paul Turner <pjt@...gle.com>, Andrew Hunter <ahh@...gle.com>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>,
        Dave Watson <davejwatson@...com>,
        Josh Triplett <josh@...htriplett.org>,
        Will Deacon <will.deacon@....com>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>, Chris Lameter <cl@...ux.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
        "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>, Ben Maurer <bmaurer@...com>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Russell King <linux@....linux.org.uk>,
        Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>,
        Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@...il.com>,
        Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        linux-api@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v9 for 4.15 01/14] Restartable sequences system call

On 10/13/2017 01:03 AM, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> Expose a new system call allowing each thread to register one userspace
> memory area to be used as an ABI between kernel and user-space for two
> purposes: user-space restartable sequences and quick access to read the
> current CPU number value from user-space.
> 
> * Restartable sequences (per-cpu atomics)
> 
> Restartables sequences allow user-space to perform update operations on
> per-cpu data without requiring heavy-weight atomic operations.
> 
> The restartable critical sections (percpu atomics) work has been started
> by Paul Turner and Andrew Hunter. It lets the kernel handle restart of
> critical sections. [1] [2] The re-implementation proposed here brings a
> few simplifications to the ABI which facilitates porting to other
> architectures and speeds up the user-space fast path. A locking-based
> fall-back, purely implemented in user-space, is proposed here to deal
> with debugger single-stepping. This fallback interacts with rseq_start()
> and rseq_finish(), which force retries in response to concurrent
> lock-based activity.

This functionality essentially relies on writable function pointers (or 
pointers to data containing function pointers), right?  Is there a way 
to make this a less attractive target for exploit writers?

Thanks,
Florian