Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750965AbaJZELy (ORCPT ); Sun, 26 Oct 2014 00:11:54 -0400 Received: from mail-lb0-f182.google.com ([209.85.217.182]:53543 "EHLO mail-lb0-f182.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750735AbaJZELx (ORCPT ); Sun, 26 Oct 2014 00:11:53 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: References: Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 05:11:51 +0100 Message-ID: Subject: Re: vmalloced stacks on x86_64? From: Frederic Weisbecker To: Andy Lutomirski Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" , X86 ML , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , Linus Torvalds , Ingo Molnar , Richard Weinberger Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 2014-10-25 2:22 GMT+02:00 Andy Lutomirski : > Is there any good reason not to use vmalloc for x86_64 stacks? > > The tricky bits I've thought of are: > > - On any context switch, we probably need to probe the new stack > before switching to it. That way, if it's going to fault due to an > out-of-sync pgd, we still have a stack available to handle the fault. Would that prevent from any further fault on a vmalloc'ed kernel stack? We would need to ensure that pre-faulting, say the first byte, is enough to sync the whole new stack entirely otherwise we risk another future fault and some places really aren't safely faulted. > > - Any time we change cr3, we may need to check that the pgd > corresponding to rsp is there. If now, we need to sync it over. > > - For simplicity, we probably want all stack ptes to be present all > the time. This is fine; vmalloc already works that way. > > - If we overrun the stack, we double-fault. This should be easy to > detect: any double-fault where rsp is less than 20 bytes from the > bottom of the stack is a failure to deliver a non-IST exception due to > a stack overflow. The question is: what do we do if this happens? > We could just panic (guaranteed to work). We could also try to > recover by killing the offending task, but that might be a bit > challenging, since we're in IST context. We could do something truly > awful: increment RSP by a few hundred bytes, point RIP at do_exit, and > return from the double fault. > > Thoughts? This shouldn't be all that much code. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/