On February 18, 2026 7:32:44 AM PST, Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]> 
wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 07:18:25AM -0800, Dave Hansen wrote:
>> ... adding kprobes folks and Kees to cc
>> 
>> On 2/18/26 06:47, Elly I. Esparza wrote:
>> > Kprobes can be used by rootkits to find the address of x64_sys_call(),
>> > x32_sys_call() and ia32_sys_call(). This in turn allows for the rootkits
>> > to find an specific syscall handler and hook it.
>> > 
>> > Add x64_sys_call(), x32_sys_call() and ia32_sys_call() to the kprobes
>> > blacklist.
>> I'm an occasional, but not super regular kprobes user. Is this going to
>> hurt folks who are legitimately probing the syscall dispatch functions?
>> 
>> I'm a bit worried that the rootkits will just move on to something else
>> and this will become a never ending game of whack-a-mole where half the
>> kernel needs NOKPROBE_SYMBOL(). ;)
>
>So I really think this should be noinstr; pretty much all the code here
>is noinstr already, so why not include the syscall dispatch.
>
>Better still, noinstr ensures the spectre-v1 mitigation actually works.

Yes, and merging the x64 and x32 dispatches into one function actually enables 
a lot of code sharing.

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