pkeys on POWER: Default AMR, UAMOR values

[Ram Pai]

On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 11:13:30PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> On 05/18/2018 09:39 PM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> >The difference is that x86 starts out with deny-all instead of allow-all.

Ah!. this explains the discrepency. But still does not explain one
thing.. see below.

> >The POWER semantics make it very hard for a multithreaded program to
> >meaningfully use protection keys to prevent accidental access to important
> >memory.
> 
> And you can change access rights for unallocated keys (unallocated
> at thread start time, allocated later) on x86.  I have extended the
> misc/tst-pkeys test to verify that, and it passes on x86, but not on
> POWER, where the access rights are stuck.

This is something I do not understand. How can a thread change permissions
on a key, that is not even allocated in the first place. Do you consider a key
allocated in some other thread's context, as allocated in this threads
context? If not, does that mean -- On x86, you can activate a key just
by changing its permission?


RP