Re: [test patch] seccomp: add code to disable TSC when enabling seccomp

[Chuck Ebbert]

In-Reply-To: <20060714020257.GC18774@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

On Fri, 14 Jul 2006 04:02:57 +0200, andrea@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> > Also, what prevents this flag from being set on a running process?
> > If that happens the CPU state and flag could get out of sync and
> > this could cause problems because of the way the current code tests
> > the flag.
> 
> Yes, there could be a tiny race where if the controller and seccomp
> tasks run on two different CPUs: the seccomp task may write to the
> pipe, and then read, but the read may not actually stop anywhere,
> because the second CPU may have enabled seccomp and answered faster
> than the first cpu. So there's tiny window for the TSC not to be
> disabled synchronously at the start of the seccomp computations (and
> if there are multiple seccomp tasks running the new ones could let the
> old ones run a timeslice with the tsc enabled).

But it looks like the mismatch could persist indefinitely: if a seccomp
task inherits the wrong cr4 flag it could pass it on to another, or back
to the original one and so on.  I think this is the only safe way:

	if (test_tsk_thread_flag(next_p, TIF_NOTSC) ||
	    test_tsk_thread_flag(prev_p, TIF_NOTSC)) {

		/* Flip TSC disable bit if necessary. */
		unsigned int cr4 = read_cr4();

		if (test_tsk_thread_flag(next_p, TIF_NOTSC)) {
			if (!(cr4 & X86_CR4_TSD))
				write_cr4(cr4 | X86_CR4_TSD);
		} else
			write_cr4(cr4 & ~X86_CR4_TSD);
	}

(Testing TSD in the 'else' path is not worth the trouble.)

> To fix the tiny window if it's the current task writing to self, we
> should also update the cr4 before returning from base.c. If it was a
> different task it's more complicated (we would need to send a forced
> sigstop, and wait the task->state to change, but then we go into the
> ptrace parallelism I truly don't want to deal with in any way in
> seccomp context). The whole point of seccomp is to be simple. So my
> suggestion is either we ignore the tiny window, or we do it only from
> the current task. If I've to deal with any sigstop then I could use
> ptrace or utrace in the first place ;).

The tiny window shouldn't be a problem, should it?  Just what is the
risk to begin with, and how much harder is it to exploit in such a
small window?

-- 
Chuck
 "You can't read a newspaper if you can't read."  --George W. Bush
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