Re: [PATCH 0/1] powerpc: Fix kuap warnings

From: Christophe Leroy (CS GROUP)
Date: Fri Jan 09 2026 - 03:12:09 EST




Le 09/01/2026 à 07:49, Shrikanth Hegde a écrit :
Recently stumbled upon these kuap warnings. This happens with
preempt=full/lazy kernel with function tracing enabled. What irked
me was kernel compilation was getting failed when i had tracing
enabled. It doesn't fail everytime. While running stress-ng memory class
it threw same warnings. So that helped to narrow it down.
So one possible way is to disable tracing for these enter/exit
vmx_usercopy. That seems to fix the bug/warnings. But that will make
them as non trace-able. If there is a better way to fix these warning while
keeping them as trace-able, please let me know.

Anyone with insights on amr, vmx and tracing, please advise.

The main principle with KUAP is to not call subfunctions once userspace access enabled. There are a few exceptions like __copy_tofrom_user() that are allowed in order to optimise large copies. However this needs to be handled very carefully, and in principle we don't expect __copy_tofrom_user() to call other functions.

So it might require wider rework but we should narrow as much as possible the period during which access to userspace is opened, with something like:

raw_coy_to_user_power7()
{
enter_vmx_usercopy();
allow_write_to_user(to, n);
ret = __copy_tofrom_user_power7();
prevent_write_to_user(to, n);
exit_vmx_usercopy();
return ret;
}

raw_copy_to_user()
{
if (cpu_has_feature(CPU_FTR_VMX_COPY))
raw_copy_to_user_power7();

allow_write_to_user(to, n);
ret = __copy_tofrom_user(to, (__force const void __user *)from, n);
prevent_write_to_user(to, n);
return ret;
}