Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/9] arm64: livepatch: Use DWARF Call Frame Information for frame pointer validation

From: Josh Poimboeuf
Date: Fri Apr 15 2022 - 22:14:02 EST


On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 04:32:22PM +0800, Chen Zhongjin wrote:
> By the way, I was thinking about a corner case, because arm64 CALL
> instruction won't push LR onto stack atomically as x86. Before push LR, FP
> to save frame there still can be some instructions such as bti, paciasp. If
> an irq happens here, the stack frame is not constructed so the FP unwinder
> will omit this function and provides a wrong stack trace to livepatch.
>
> It's just a guess and I have not built the test case. But I think it's a
> defect on arm64 that FP unwinder can't work properly on prologue and
> epilogue. Do you have any idea about this?

x86 has similar issues with frame pointers, if for example preemption or
page fault exception occurs in a leaf function, or in a function
prologue or epilogue, before or after the frame pointer setup.

This issue is solved by the "reliable" unwinder which detects
irqs/exceptions on the stack and reports the stack as unreliable.

--
Josh