• Nicholas Piggin's avatar
    powerpc/64s/radix: Boot-time NULL pointer protection using a guard-PID · eeb715c3
    Nicholas Piggin authored
    This change restores and formalises the behaviour that access to NULL
    or other user addresses by the kernel during boot should fault rather
    than succeed and modify memory. This was inadvertently broken when
    fixing another bug, because it was previously not well defined and
    only worked by chance.
    
    powerpc/64s/radix uses high address bits to select an address space
    "quadrant", which determines which PID and LPID are used to translate
    the rest of the address (effective PID, effective LPID). The kernel
    mapping at 0xC... selects quadrant 3, which uses PID=0 and LPID=0. So
    the kernel page tables are installed in the PID 0 process table entry.
    
    An address at 0x0... selects quadrant 0, which uses PID=PIDR for
    translating the rest of the address (that is, it uses the value of the
    PIDR register as the effective PID). If PIDR=0, then the translation
    is performed with the PID 0 process table entry page tables. This is
    the kernel mapping, so we effectively get another copy of the kernel
    address space at 0. A NULL pointer access will access physical memory
    address 0.
    
    To prevent duplicating the kernel address space in quadrant 0, this
    patch allocates a guard PID containing no translations, and
    initializes PIDR with this during boot, before the MMU is switched on.
    Any kernel access to quadrant 0 will use this guard PID for
    translation and find no valid mappings, and therefore fault.
    
    After boot, this PID will be switchd away to user context PIDs, but
    those contain user mappings (and usually NULL pointer protection)
    rather than kernel mapping, which is much safer (and by design). It
    may be in future this is tightened further, which the guard PID could
    be used for.
    
    Commit 371b8044 ("powerpc/64s: Initialize ISAv3 MMU registers before
    setting partition table"), introduced this problem because it zeroes
    PIDR at boot. However previously the value was inherited from firmware
    or kexec, which is not robust and can be zero (e.g., mambo).
    
    Fixes: 371b8044 ("powerpc/64s: Initialize ISAv3 MMU registers before setting partition table")
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v4.15+
    Reported-by: default avatarFlorian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarMauricio Faria de Oliveira <mauricfo@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarNicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMichael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
    eeb715c3
pgtable-radix.c 23 KB