Re: [PATCH RFT v4 5/5] kselftest/clone3: Test shadow stack support

[Mark Brown]

On Tue, Dec 05, 2023 at 12:10:20AM +0000, Edgecombe, Rick P wrote:

> Without this diff, the test crashed for me on a shadow stack system:

> -static inline void enable_shadow_stack(void)
> +static inline __attribute__((always_inline)) void

doh.

> But I wonder if the clone3 test should get its shadow stack enabled the
> conventional elf bit way. So if it's all there (HW, kernel, glibc) then
> the test will run with shadow stack. Otherwise the test will run
> without shadow stack.

This creates bootstrapping issues if we do it for arm64 where nothing is
merged yet except for the model and EL3 support - in order to get any
test coverage you need to be using an OS with the libc and toolchain
support available and that's not going to be something we can rely on
for a while (and even when things are merged a lot of the CI systems use
Debian).  There is a small risk that the toolchain will generate
incompatible code if it doesn't know it's specifically targetting shadow
stacks but the toolchain people didn't seem concerned about that risk
and we've not been running into problems.

It looks x86 is in better shape here with the userspace having run ahead
of the kernel support though I'm not 100% clear if everything is fully
lined up?  -mshstk -fcf-protection appears to build fine with gcc 8 but
I'm a bit less clear on glibc and any ABI variations.

> The other reason is that the shadow stack test in the x86 selftest
> manual enabling is designed to work without a shadow stack enabled
> glibc and has to be specially crafted to work around the missing
> support. I'm not sure the more generic selftests should have to know
> how to do this. So what about something like this instead:

What's the issue with working around the missing support?  My
understanding was that there should be no ill effects from repeated
attempts to enable.  We could add a check for things already being
enabled

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