Executing from readablee, no-exec pages
Scott Wood
scottwood at freescale.com
Fri Jul 6 07:55:32 EST 2007
As revealed by the recent "Prevent data exception in kernel space"
patch, versions of glibc prior to 2.4[1] assume that, on powerpc32, they
can execute out of any readable mapping, regardless of whether it is
marked for execution. This happens in the elf_machine_load_address()
function.
To maintain compatibility with these versions, we could change the test
in do_page_fault() to include VM_READ as well as VM_EXEC on targets that
don't have a separate exec-bit in hardware (are there any powerpc mmus
that do?). However, Segher suggested on IRC that we may want to drop
compatibility with those old versions of glibc, and that I should seek
your input.
Personally, I'd rather stick the VM_READ in there, partially for selfish
reasons (our root filesystems are based on older glibcs), and because it
seems a little too soon to deprecate glibc 2.3, but also because in the
absence of hardware support, the VM_EXEC check will be nondeterministic,
kicking in only when the first fault for a page is to execute.
-Scott
[1] It's possible that there are other instances of this in 2.4 and that
the actual version is newer; I ran into obnoxious cross compilation
issues trying to try it. However,
<rant>
Glibc already has target-specific code/headers; if you need to know
something that you'd otherwise need a runs-on-the-target autoconf test
for, why not just stick it in such a target-specific header? In this
case, it was trying to figure out the size of "long double".
</rant>
More information about the Linuxppc-dev
mailing list