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Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 00:10:43 -0500
From: Bobby Bingham <koorogi@...rogi.info>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: possible bug in setjmp implementation for ppc64

On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 04:30:07PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 10:06:51PM +0200, felix.winkelmann@...uta.com wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > I think I may have come across a bug in musl on PPC64(le), and the folks
> > on the #musl IRC channel directed me here. I'm not totally sure whether
> > the problem is caused by a my misunderstanding of C library functions or whether
> > it is a plain bug in the musl implementation of setjmp(3).
> >
> > In out project[1] we use setjmp to establish a global trampoline
> > and allocate small objects on the stack using alloca (see [2] for
> > more information about the compiliation strategy used). I was able to reduce
> > the code that crashes to the following:
> >
> > ---
> > #include <stdio.h>
> > #include <alloca.h>
> > #include <setjmp.h>
> > #include <string.h>
> > #include <stdlib.h>
> >
> > jmp_buf jb;
> >
> > int foo = 99;
> > int c = 0;
> >
> > void bar()
> > {
> >   c++;
> >   longjmp(jb, 1);
> > }
> >
> > int main()
> > {
> >   setjmp(jb);
> >   char *p = alloca(256);
> >   memset(p, 0, 256);
> >   printf("%d\n", foo);
> >
> >   if(c < 10) bar();
> >
> >   exit(0);
> > }
> > ---
> >
> > When executing the longjmp, the code that restores $r2 (TOC) after the call
> > to setjmp reads invalid data, because the memset apparently clobbered
> > the stack frame - i.e. the pointer returned be alloca points into a part
> > of the stack frame that is still in use.
> >
> > I tried this on arm, x86_64 and ppc64 with glibc and it seems to work fine,
> > but crashes when linked with musl (running Alpine Linux on a VM)
> >
> > If you need more information, please feel free to ask. You can also keep
> > me CC'd, since I'd be interested in knowing more about the details.
>
> It looks to me like we have a bug here, but it's one where I or
> someone else needs to read and understand the PPC64 ELFv2 ABI document
> to fully understand what's going on and make a fix. I'll try to get to
> it soon, or I'm happy if someone else wants to. I don't just want to
> cargo-cult whatever glibc is doing, though; a fix should be
> accompanied by an understanding of why it's right.

I think I can explain what's happening.

The TOC pointer is constant within a given dynamic module (the main
executable or a library), but needs to be adjusted at cross-module
calls.  Each function has two entry points in the ELFv2 ABI.  The entry
point for intra-module calls can assume r2 is already set up correctly.
The entry point for inter-module calls starts two instructions earlier
and adjusts r2 before falling through to the intra-module entry point.

Normally, r2 is supposed to be preserved across calls.  For intra-module
calls, there's no problem.  For inter-module calls, the PLT stub saves
the caller's r2 value to a slot in the caller's stack frame that's
required to be reserved for it, at r1+24.  The linker then inserts code
in the caller to restore the value from the stack immediately after the
call.

So what's happening here is that the value of r2 that setjmp saves and
that longjmp restores is the TOC pointer for libc, as set up by the PLT
stub.  It's not the value of r2 that the caller had.  But that's
normally fine -- after the second return from setjmp, the caller will
restore its TOC pointer from the stack where it had been saved by the
PLT stub when it originally called setjmp.  But in this example, gcc
decides to allocate the 256 bytes overtop the part of the stack where
the setjmp PLT stub had saved the TOC pointer, so it gets clobbered.

The problem is that static linking and dynamic linking need to work
differently.  With dynamic linking, we can fix this by changing setjmp
to read the caller's TOC pointer from the reserved slot in the caller's
stack frame, and longjmp to restore it to the stack instead of to r2.

But with static linking, there's no PLT stub or code added by the linker
to restore the TOC pointer from the stack, so we need to save/restore
from/to r2, not the TOC slot in the caller's stack from.

I think this either requires having different versions of setjmp/longjmp
for static and dynamic libc, or to increase the size of jmpbuf so we can
always save/restore both r2 and the value on the stack, but this would
be an ABI change.

--
Bobby

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