Re: [RFC] x86/mm/KASLR: Remap GDTs at fixed location

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 3:05 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 12:18 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Hmm.  I bet that if we preset the accessed bits in all the segments
>> then we don't need it to be writable in general.
>
> I'm not sure that this is architecturally safe.
>

Hmm.  Last time I looked, I couldn't find *anything* in the SDM
explaining what happened if a GDT access resulted in a page fault.  I
did discover that Xen intentionally (!) lazily populates and maps LDT
pages.  An attempt to access a not-present page results in #PF with
the error cod e indicating kernel access even if the access came from
user mode.

SDM volume 3 7.2.2 says "Pages corresponding to the previous taskâs
TSS, the current taskâs TSS, and the descriptor table entries for
each all should be marked as read/write."  But I don't see how a CPU
implementation could possibly care what the page table for the TSS
descriptor table entries says after LTR is done because the CPU isn't
even supposed to *read* that memory.

OTOH a valid implementation could easily require that the page table
says that the page is writable merely to load a segment, especially in
weird cases (IRET?).  That being said, this is all quite easy to test.

Also, Thomas, why are you creating a new memory region?  I don't see
any benefit to randomizing the GDT address.  How about just putting it
in the fixmap?  This  would be NR_CPUS * 4 pages if do my limit=0xffff
idea.  I'm not sure if the fixmap code knows how to handle this much
space.