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

[Michal Hocko]

On Wed 05-07-17 13:19:40, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Tue, 2017-07-04 at 16:31 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 4:01 PM, Ben Hutchings <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > wrote:
> > > 
> > > We have:
> > > 
> > > bottom = 0xff803fff
> > > sp =     0xffffb178
> > > 
> > > The relevant mappings are:
> > > 
> > > ff7fc000-ff7fd000 rwxp 00000000 00:00 0
> > > fffdd000-ffffe000 rw-p 00000000 00:00
> > > 0                                  [stack]
> > 
> > Ugh. So that stack is actually 8MB in size, but the alloca() is about
> > to use up almost all of it, and there's only about 28kB left between
> > "bottom" and that 'rwx' mapping.
> > 
> > Still, that rwx mapping is interesting: it is a single page, and it
> > really is almost exactly 8MB below the stack.
> > 
> > In fact, the top of stack (at 0xffffe000) is *exactly* 8MB+4kB from
> > the top of that odd one-page allocation (0xff7fd000).
> > 
> > Can you find out where that is allocated? Perhaps a breakpoint on
> > mmap, with a condition to catch that particular one?
> [...]
> 
> Found it, and it's now clear why only i386 is affected:
> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/jdk8/hotspot/file/tip/src/os/linux/vm/os_linux.cpp#l4852
> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/jdk8/hotspot/file/tip/src/os_cpu/linux_x86/vm/os_linux_x86.cpp#l881

This is really worrying. This doesn't look like a gap at all. It is a
mapping which actually contains a code and so we should absolutely not
allow to scribble over it. So I am afraid the only way forward is to
allow per process stack gap and run this particular program to have a
smaller gap. We basically have two ways. Either /proc/<pid>/$file or
a prctl inherited on exec. The later is a smaller code. What do you
think?
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs