New vsyscall emulation breaks JITs

From: Andi Kleen
Date: Fri Aug 05 2011 - 16:09:53 EST



Andy,

We found that your new vsyscall emulation in

commit 5cec93c216db77c45f7ce970d46283bcb1933884
Author: Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxx>
Date: Sun Jun 5 13:50:24 2011 -0400

x86-64: Emulate legacy vsyscalls

breaks JITs that execute x86 code and use the legacy vsyscalls.

The problem is that the JIT translates the vsyscall page into
its code buffer and executes the "int 0xcc" there. Then
when the kernel gets the interrupt it doesn't see the vsyscall
page as the source and crashes the program.

For some reason several modern executables also seem
to still use the old vsyscall page, so this problem can be hit
quickly.

This happened with pin (http://www.pintool.org/), however
I expect it will affect all user space x86 JITs (valgrind,
dynamo, qemu-user, etc.)

What to do? Right now this broke existing setups.

-Andi
--
ak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- Speaking for myself only
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/