[PATCH 0/3] Fix a misaligned load inside ptrace_attach()

From: Palmer Dabbelt
Date: Fri May 01 2015 - 00:26:28 EST


I ran across what I believe is a bug in some asm-generic code while
working on the RISC-V Linux port. Essentially the problem is that
wait_on_bit() takes a void *, but then perfroms long-aligned
operation. As far as I can tell, this bug could manifest on any other
architecture that doesn't support misaligned operations and uses this
particular asm-generic implementation.

The patch set is split into three parts:

* #1 fixes the bug by making task_struct.jobctl an unsigned long,
which ensures wait_on_bit() always ends up with a long-aligned
argument.

* #2 changes the prototype of wait_on_bit() and friends to take a
"unsigned long *" instead of a "void *", with the intent of
ensuring these problems don't happen again.

* #3 is a bit more intrusive: it goes and changes all uses of
task_struct.jobctl from int to long.

I'm not sure if #3 has gone too far, but I think #1 and #2 are sane.
The cost is making task_struct larger on machines where
sizeof(long)>sizeof(int), but since it's so big already this isn't too
much cost. I thought about making test_bit() perform byte-aligned
accesses to avoid this cost, but since there are very similar looking
atomic functions I thought that would be too odd.

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