Commit 7cde9b27 authored Oct 10, 2013 by Frediano Ziglio Committed by Stefano Stabellini Oct 10, 2013

xen: Fix possible user space selector corruption



Due to the way kernel is initialized under Xen is possible that the
ring1 selector used by the kernel for the boot cpu end up to be copied
to userspace leading to segmentation fault in the userspace.

Xen code in the kernel initialize no-boot cpus with correct selectors (ds
and es set to __USER_DS) but the boot one keep the ring1 (passed by Xen).
On task context switch (switch_to) we assume that ds, es and cs already
point to __USER_DS and __KERNEL_CSso these selector are not changed.

If processor is an Intel that support sysenter instruction sysenter/sysexit
is used so ds and es are not restored switching back from kernel to
userspace. In the case the selectors point to a ring1 instead of __USER_DS
the userspace code will crash on first memory access attempt (to be
precise Xen on the emulated iret used to do sysexit will detect and set ds
and es to zero which lead to GPF anyway).

Now if an userspace process call kernel using sysenter and get rescheduled
(for me it happen on a specific init calling wait4) could happen that the
ring1 selector is set to ds and es.

This is quite hard to detect cause after a while these selectors are fixed
(__USER_DS seems sticky).

Bisecting the code commit 7076aada appears
to be the first one that have this issue.

Signed-off-by: Frediano Ziglio <frediano.ziglio@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@eu.citrix.com>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>

parent 8702c675

arch/x86/xen/smp.c

+9 −0

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -278,6 +278,15 @@ static void __init xen_smp_prepare_boot_cpu(void)
		old memory can be recycled */
		make_lowmem_page_readwrite(xen_initial_gdt);

		#ifdef CONFIG_X86_32
		/*
		* Xen starts us with XEN_FLAT_RING1_DS, but linux code
		* expects __USER_DS
		*/
		loadsegment(ds, __USER_DS);
		loadsegment(es, __USER_DS);
		#endif

		xen_filter_cpu_maps();
		xen_setup_vcpu_info_placement();
		}

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