On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 6:17 AM Florian Weimer <fwei...@redhat.com> wrote:
> I'm working on adding POWER pkeys support to glibc. The coding work is > done, but I'm faced with some test suite failures. > Unlike the default x86 configuration, on POWER, existing threads have > full access to newly allocated keys. > Or, more precisely, in this scenario: > * Thread A launches thread B > * Thread B waits > * Thread A allocations a protection key with pkey_alloc > * Thread A applies the key to a page > * Thread A signals thread B > * Thread B starts to run and accesses the page > Then at the end, the access will be granted. > I hope it's not too late to change this to denied access. > Furthermore, I think the UAMOR value is wrong as well because it > prevents thread B at the end to set the AMR register. In particular, if > I do this > * … (as before) > * Thread A signals thread B > * Thread B sets the access rights for the key to PKEY_DISABLE_ACCESS > * Thread B reads the current access rights for the key > then it still gets 0 (all access permitted) because the original UAMOR > value inherited from thread A prior to the key allocation masks out the > access right update for the newly allocated key. This type of issue is why I think that a good protection key ISA would not have a usermode read-the-whole-register or write-the-whole-register operation at all. It's still not clear to me that there is any good kernel-mode solution. But at least x86 defaults to deny-everything, which is more annoying but considerably safer than POWER's behavior. --Andy
