Re: [BUG] arm64: an infinite loop in generic_perform_write()

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Thu Jun 24 2021 - 16:37:03 EST


On 2021-06-24 19:55, Catalin Marinas wrote:
On Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 04:27:17PM +0000, Al Viro wrote:
On Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 02:22:27PM +0100, Robin Murphy wrote:
FWIW I think the only way to make the kernel behaviour any more robust here
would be to make the whole uaccess API more expressive, such that rather
than simply saying "I only got this far" it could actually differentiate
between stopping due to a fault which may be recoverable and worth retrying,
and one which definitely isn't.

... and propagate that "more expressive" information through what, 3 or 4
levels in the call chain?

From include/linux/uaccess.h:

* If raw_copy_{to,from}_user(to, from, size) returns N, size - N bytes starting
* at to must become equal to the bytes fetched from the corresponding area
* starting at from. All data past to + size - N must be left unmodified.
*
* If copying succeeds, the return value must be 0. If some data cannot be
* fetched, it is permitted to copy less than had been fetched; the only
* hard requirement is that not storing anything at all (i.e. returning size)
* should happen only when nothing could be copied. In other words, you don't
* have to squeeze as much as possible - it is allowed, but not necessary.

arm64 instances violate the aforementioned hard requirement.

After reading the above a few more times, I think I get it. The key
sentence is: not storing anything at all should happen only when nothing
could be copied. In the MTE case, something can still be copied.

Please, fix
it there; it's not hard. All you need is an exception handler in .Ltiny15
that would fall back to (short) byte-by-byte copy if the faulting address
happened to be unaligned. Or just do one-byte copy, not that it had been
considerably cheaper than a loop. Will be cheaper than propagating that extra
information up the call chain, let alone paying for extra ->write_begin()
and ->write_end() for single byte in generic_perform_write().

Yeah, it's definitely fixable in the arch code. I misread the above
requirements and thought it could be fixed in the core code.

Quick hack, though I think in the actual exception handling path in .S
more sense (and it needs the copy_to_user for symmetry):

Hmm, if anything the asm version might be even more straightforward; I think it's pretty much just this (untested):

diff --git a/arch/arm64/lib/copy_to_user.S b/arch/arm64/lib/copy_to_user.S
index 043da90f5dd7..632bf1f9540d 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/lib/copy_to_user.S
+++ b/arch/arm64/lib/copy_to_user.S
@@ -62,6 +62,9 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL(__arch_copy_to_user)

.section .fixup,"ax"
.align 2
-9998: sub x0, end, dst // bytes not copied
+9998: ldrb w7, [x1]
+USER(9997f, sttrb w7, [x0])
+ add x0, x0, #1
+9997: sub x0, end, dst // bytes not copied
ret
.previous

If we can get away without trying to finish the whole copy bytewise, (i.e. we don't cause any faults of our own by knowingly over-reading in the routine itself), I'm more than happy with that.

Robin.

diff --git a/arch/arm64/include/asm/uaccess.h b/arch/arm64/include/asm/uaccess.h
index b5f08621fa29..903f8a2a457b 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/include/asm/uaccess.h
+++ b/arch/arm64/include/asm/uaccess.h
@@ -415,6 +415,15 @@ extern unsigned long __must_check __arch_copy_from_user(void *to, const void __u
uaccess_ttbr0_enable(); \
__acfu_ret = __arch_copy_from_user((to), \
__uaccess_mask_ptr(from), (n)); \
+ if (__acfu_ret == n) { \
+ int __cfu_err = 0; \
+ char __cfu_val; \
+ __raw_get_mem("ldtr", __cfu_val, (char *)from, __cfu_err);\
+ if (!__cfu_err) { \
+ *(char *)to = __cfu_val; \
+ __acfu_ret--; \
+ } \
+ } \
uaccess_ttbr0_disable(); \
__acfu_ret; \
})

Of course, it only fixes the MTE problem, I'll ignore the MMIO case
(though it may work in certain configurations like synchronous faults).