From: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Subject: Re: x86-64: Maintain 16-byte stack alignment
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2017 22:01:21 -0800
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Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux Crypto Mailing List <linux-crypto@vger.kernel.org>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>,
        Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org>
To: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
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On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 8:35 PM, Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 08:17:17PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>>
>> That said, I do think that the "don't assume stack alignment, do it by
>> hand" may be the safer thing. Because who knows what the random rules
>> will be on other architectures.
>
> Sure we can ban the use of attribute aligned on stacks.  But
> what about indirect uses through structures?  For example, if
> someone does
>
> struct foo {
> } __attribute__ ((__aligned__(16)));
>
> int bar(...)
> {
>         struct foo f;
>
>         return baz(&f);
> }
>
> then baz will end up with an unaligned argument.  The worst part
> is that it is not at all obvious to the person writing the function
> bar.

Linus, I'm starting to lean toward agreeing with Herbert here, except
that we should consider making it conditional on having a silly GCC
version.  After all, the silly GCC versions are wasting space and time
with alignment instructions no matter what we do, so this would just
mean tweaking the asm and adding some kind of check_stack_alignment()
helper to throw out a WARN_ONCE() if we miss one.  The problem with
making it conditional is that making pt_regs effectively live at a
variable offset from %rsp is just nasty.

--Andy