Re: [PATCH] mm: larger stack guard gap, between vmas

[Ben Hutchings]

On Wed, 2017-07-05 at 10:14 +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 05, 2017 at 08:36:46AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > PROT_NONE would explicitly fault but we would simply
> > run over this mapping too easily and who knows what might end up below
> > it. So to me the guard gap does its job here.
> 
> I tend to think that applications that implement their own stack guard
> using PROT_NONE also assume that they will never perfom unchecked stack
> allocations larger than their own guard, thus the condition above should
> never happen. Otherwise they're bogus and/or vulnerable by design and it
> is their responsibility to fix it.
> 
> Thus maybe if that helps we could even relax some of the stack guard
> checks as soon as we meet a PROT_NONE area, allowing VMAs to be tightly
> packed if the application knows what it's doing. That wouldn't solve
> the libreoffice issue though, given the lower page is RWX.

How about, instead of looking at permissions, we remember whether vmas
were allocated with MAP_FIXED and ignore those when evaluating the gap?

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Anthony's Law of Force: Don't force it, get a larger hammer.

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