[PATCH 1/9] kernel: add a PF_FORCE_COMPAT flag

[Pavel Begunkov]

On 20/09/2020 01:22, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> 
>> On Sep 19, 2020, at 2:16 PM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 6:21 PM Andy Lutomirski <luto at kernel.org> wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 8:16 AM Christoph Hellwig <hch at lst.de> wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 02:58:22PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
>>>>> Said that, why not provide a variant that would take an explicit
>>>>> "is it compat" argument and use it there?  And have the normal
>>>>> one pass in_compat_syscall() to that...
>>>>
>>>> That would help to not introduce a regression with this series yes.
>>>> But it wouldn't fix existing bugs when io_uring is used to access
>>>> read or write methods that use in_compat_syscall().  One example that
>>>> I recently ran into is drivers/scsi/sg.c.
>>
>> Ah, so reading /dev/input/event* would suffer from the same issue,
>> and that one would in fact be broken by your patch in the hypothetical
>> case that someone tried to use io_uring to read /dev/input/event on x32...
>>
>> For reference, I checked the socket timestamp handling that has a
>> number of corner cases with time32/time64 formats in compat mode,
>> but none of those appear to be affected by the problem.
>>
>>> Aside from the potentially nasty use of per-task variables, one thing
>>> I don't like about PF_FORCE_COMPAT is that it's one-way.  If we're
>>> going to have a generic mechanism for this, shouldn't we allow a full
>>> override of the syscall arch instead of just allowing forcing compat
>>> so that a compat syscall can do a non-compat operation?
>>
>> The only reason it's needed here is that the caller is in a kernel
>> thread rather than a system call. Are there any possible scenarios
>> where one would actually need the opposite?
>>
> 
> I can certainly imagine needing to force x32 mode from a kernel thread.
> 
> As for the other direction: what exactly are the desired bitness/arch semantics of io_uring?  Is the operation bitness chosen by the io_uring creation or by the io_uring_enter() bitness?

It's rather the second one. Even though AFAIR it wasn't discussed
specifically, that how it works now (_partially_).

-- 
Pavel Begunkov