Re: vmalloced stacks on x86_64?

[Richard Weinberger]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 2:22 AM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.
>
>  - 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.

FWIW, grsecurity has this already.
Maybe we can reuse their GRKERNSEC_KSTACKOVERFLOW feature.
It allocates the kernel stack using vmalloc() and installs guard pages.

-- 
Thanks,
//richard
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