MIPS: fork: Fix MSA/FPU/DSP context duplication race
There is a race in the MIPS fork code which allows the child to get a stale copy of parent MSA/FPU/DSP state that is active in hardware registers when the fork() is called. This is because copy_thread() saves the live register state into the child context only if the hardware is currently in use, apparently on the assumption that the hardware state cannot have been saved and disabled since the initial duplication of the task_struct. However preemption is certainly possible during this window. An example sequence of events is as follows: 1) The parent userland process puts important data into saved floating point registers ($f20-$f31), which are then dirty compared to the process' stored context. 2) The parent process calls fork() which does a clone system call. 3) In the kernel, do_fork() -> copy_process() -> dup_task_struct() -> arch_dup_task_struct() (which uses the weakly defined default implementation). This duplicates the parent process' task context, which includes a stale version of its FP context from when it was last saved, probably some time before (1). 4) At some point before copy_process() calls copy_thread(), such as when duplicating the memory map, the process is desceduled. Perhaps it is preempted asynchronously, or perhaps it sleeps while blocked on a mutex. The dirty FP state in the FP registers is saved to the parent process' context and the FPU is disabled. 5) When the process is rescheduled again it continues copying state until it gets to copy_thread(), which checks whether the FPU is in use, so that it can copy that dirty state to the child process' task context. Because of the deschedule however the FPU is not in use, so the child process' context is left with stale FP context from the last time the parent saved it (some time before (1)). 6) When the new child process is scheduled it reads the important data from the saved floating point register, and ends up doing a NULL pointer dereference as a result of the stale data. This use of saved floating point registers across function calls can be triggered fairly easily by explicitly using inline asm with a current (MIPS R2) compiler, but is far more likely to happen unintentionally with a MIPS R6 compiler where the FP registers are more likely to get used as scratch registers for storing non-fp data. It is easily fixed, in the same way that other architectures do it, by overriding the implementation of arch_dup_task_struct() to sync the dirty hardware state to the parent process' task context *prior* to duplicating it, rather than copying straight to the child process' task context in copy_thread(). Note, the FPU hardware is not disabled so the parent process may continue executing with the live register context, but now the child process is guaranteed to have an identical copy of it at that point. Signed-off-by: James Hogan <james.hogan@imgtec.com> Reported-by: Matthew Fortune <matthew.fortune@imgtec.com> Tested-by: Markos Chandras <markos.chandras@imgtec.com> Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org> Cc: Paul Burton <paul.burton@imgtec.com> Cc: linux-mips@linux-mips.org Patchwork: https://patchwork.linux-mips.org/patch/9075/Signed-off-by: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
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