arm64: W+X mapping check failures
Jan Glauber
jan.glauber at caviumnetworks.com
Wed Apr 25 06:37:04 PDT 2018
Hi all,
enabling CONFIG_DEBUG_WX we see insecure mappings reported across various kernel
versions and machines. I've not yet seen this with upstream but that doesn't
mean much as the issue is a race and I cannot trigger it reliably.
The reported W+X mappings are gone after the boot is finished. The addresses
all belong to .init.* sections of the first loaded kernel modules.
Example log (I changed the warnings as I found the backtrace quite useless):
[ 39.157884] Freeing unused kernel memory: 5248K
[ 39.167997] note_prot_wx: Found insecure W+X mapping at start: ffff000000ab9000 addr: ffff000000abd000 pages: 4
[ 39.178246] note_prot_wx: Found insecure W+X mapping at start: ffff000000ac3000 addr: ffff000000ac5000 pages: 2
[ 39.188495] note_prot_wx: Found insecure W+X mapping at start: ffff000000acd000 addr: ffff000000ad0000 pages: 3
[ 39.198745] note_prot_wx: Found insecure W+X mapping at start: ffff000000af9000 addr: ffff000000afc000 pages: 3
[ 39.212981] Checked W+X mappings: FAILED, 12 W+X pages found, 0 non-UXN pages found
I think this is a race between module loading and the ptdump_check_wx().
The RCU'd do_free_init() can be delayed _after_ ptdump_check_wx() for a coming module.
I tried using stop_machine() around the memory check similar to arm but that does not
solve the race. It is not a critical issue as the .init sections are freed afterwards
anyway but still the warning is a bit misleading.
Any thoughts?
--Jan
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