Re: Minor PKRU bug?

[Dave Hansen]

On 07/21/2016 02:48 PM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> >I like it, except that reading just a single byte is a bit silly.
>> >OTOH, that's what the current code needs and I see no fundamental
>> >reason to change it until there's a real user.
>>> 
> The thing is that we can't actually test this, since there is no
> machine on which this code path will ever execute.  That concerns me
> a bit.

I rigged the is_prefetch() check to return true on an instruction that I
know causes a sigbus.  If I run without protection keys, this setup sits
in a never-ending fault loop, which is the behavior that we want from
*real* prefetch instructions.

But, if I have that instruction be marked execute-only by pkeys,
is_prefetch() returns false and the app gets the sigbus, and it *looks*
like it came from the (fake) prefetch instruction, which isn't what we want.

It's not exactly a real-world test, but it did convince me that the code
is doing the right thing.