Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 03/08/16 10:50, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 8, 2016 at 10:47 AM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 03/08/16 10:45, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>>
>>> s/modern/most, perhaps?
>>>
>>> I'm hoping that some day Bionic goes away and gets replaced by musl.
>>>
>>> Of course, musl doesn't always use fast syscalls because it needs a
>>> vdso facility that doesn't currently exist.  I'll deal with that
>>> eventually.
>>>
>>
>> You don't actually need actual DSO support to support fast system calls
>> on i386.  Even klibc uses them now, and the additional code to support
>> it is trivial.
> 
> That's not the issue.  The issue is that musl does something
> crazy^Wclever to support POSIX pthread cancellation, and it involves
> being able to tell whether a signal's ucontext points to a syscall
> and, if so, what the return address is.  This is straightforward with
> an inlined int $0x80, but doing it reliably with the current vdso
> design would requiring parsing the DWARF data, and I can't really
> blame musl for not wanting to do that.
> 
> There was a thread awhile back about adding a new vdso helper to do
> this.  I think I even had some code for it.  If I find time, I'll try
> to send patches for 4.7.
> 

As far as I know, when we get a signal the EIP always points to int
$0x80 as we don't support system call restart (being a rare case) for
the fast system calls.

	-hpa