syscall: three globals on the entry path, shared by every CPU

One to four processes died per boot with a fault they could not have caused:
`rip 0x0` -- an instruction fetch at zero, which a process does not branch to
-- or a dereference of `0xffffffffffffffea`, which is `-EINVAL`. It hit shells
and schinitd alike and had been carried for a long time as "zsh sometimes jumps
into .data".

`syscall_entry` has to swap FS_BASE from the user's TLS to the kernel's before
it can touch any `%fs:` data, and `wrmsr` destroys rax, rcx and rdx. Those have
to be parked somewhere first -- not on the user stack, which is untrusted and
has not been switched away from yet. They were parked in three globals:

    // Single-CPU scratch for syscall_entry FS swap
    // (safe while IF cleared by SYSCALL/SFMASK)
    uint64 _sc_rax, _sc_rcx, _sc_rdx;

IF being clear answers for an interrupt arriving on *this* CPU. It says nothing
whatever about a second CPU executing the same three stores at the same
instant, and with more than one processor entering syscalls that is not a rare
interleaving -- it is the ordinary one.

**%rcx is the user return address.** SYSCALL puts the user's rip there and
SYSRET takes it back from there. So the CPU that lost the race returned its
process into *another process's* instruction stream, with %rax -- the syscall
number on the way in, the return value on the way out -- swapped alongside it.
Both symptoms fall straight out of that: a zero handed over and followed, and
an errno used as a pointer.

Per-CPU words at %gs:32..48 now. %gs is usable there, before the FS swap, for
exactly the reason RESTORE_KERNEL_FS can already read %gs:0: GS base is per-CPU
in hardware, seginit() sets it once, and userspace cannot change it --
sys_arch_prctl() implements ARCH_SET_FS and ARCH_GET_FS and rejects the rest.

Measured rather than argued. Both variants built once, `build/esp` saved for
each, the same pristine schfs.img restored before every boot, -smp 4:

    three globals     10 boots    10 faults, in five of the ten
    three per-CPU     18 boots     0 faults

A _Static_assert pins all seven per-CPU offsets, because trapasm.S spells them
as literals and cannot include a header -- a slot that moves would leave a
register quietly holding somebody else's value, which is the hardest possible
thing to find.

**This is the second bug of this exact shape in this file.** The first was
`kernel_fs_base`, a single global every CPU wrote during its own seginit(), so
the last writer won and every CPU restored one CPU's per-CPU block;
RESTORE_KERNEL_FS reads %gs:0 for that reason. The lesson generalises and is
now written down in both places: **on the entry path, a global is a bug.**

Closes the row added to Gate 0 four commits ago. It was the right row to put
first -- a compositor built on this would have failed in ways indistinguishable
from its own bugs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-09-21 22:56:45 +02:00
commit 3185685997
6 changed files with 173 additions and 36 deletions

View file

@ -45,15 +45,63 @@ The per-CPU block's base is in **both** `FS_BASE` and `GS_BASE`, set by
+8 syscall scratch trapasm.S parks %rsp here across the stack switch
+16 struct cpu *
+24 struct proc *
+32 syscall rax the three registers wrmsr destroys, parked across
+40 syscall rcx the FS_BASE swap at the top of syscall_entry
+48 syscall rdx
```
**These offsets are shared with assembly and must not be reordered.** Offset 8
is not free: `syscall_entry` uses `%fs:(8)`, and because FS and GS base point at
the same address, that is the same memory as `%gs:8`.
the same address, that is the same memory as `%gs:8`. A `_Static_assert` in
`vm.c` pins all seven, because assembly spells them as literals and a slot that
moves leaves a register quietly holding somebody else's value.
Reached through `mycpu()` and `myproc()`, which compile to a single
`movq %gs:16` / `%gs:24` with no cached base.
### The three words at +32, and what they cost before they were here
`syscall_entry` has to swap `FS_BASE` from the user's TLS to the kernel's
before it can touch any `%fs:` data, and `wrmsr` destroys `rax`, `rcx` and
`rdx`. Those three have to be parked somewhere first — not on the user stack,
which is untrusted and has not been switched away from yet.
They were parked in **three globals**, `_sc_rax`, `_sc_rcx` and `_sc_rdx`,
under a comment reading:
> Single-CPU scratch for syscall_entry FS swap (safe while IF cleared by
> SYSCALL/SFMASK)
`IF` being clear answers for an interrupt arriving on *this* CPU. It says
nothing about a second CPU executing the same three stores at the same instant,
and with more than one processor entering syscalls that is not a rare
interleaving — it is the ordinary one.
**`%rcx` is the user return address.** `SYSCALL` puts the user's `rip` there and
`SYSRET` takes it back from there. So the CPU that lost the race returned its
process into *another process's* instruction stream, and `%rax` — the syscall
number on the way in, the return value on the way out — was swapped with it.
The symptom was one to four processes per boot dying at `rip 0x0` (an
instruction fetch at zero, which a process does not branch to; it is handed a
zero and follows it) or dereferencing `0xffffffffffffffea`, which is `-EINVAL`:
a syscall return value used as a pointer. It hit shells and `schinitd` alike,
and it had been written off as a mysterious "zsh sometimes jumps into .data".
Measured, at four CPUs, with the same pristine disk image each run:
| | boots | faults |
|---|---|---|
| three globals | 10 | **10**, in five of the ten boots |
| three per-CPU words | 18 | **0** |
This is the *second* bug of exactly this shape in this file. The first was
`kernel_fs_base`, a single global that every CPU wrote during its own
`seginit()`, so the last writer won and every CPU restored one CPU's block.
`RESTORE_KERNEL_FS` reads `%gs:0` now for that reason. The lesson generalises
and is worth stating plainly: **on the entry path, a global is a bug.** There is
one per-CPU block and everything that changes per CPU belongs in it.
> **`__thread` is wrong for per-CPU kernel data**, and this is the single most
> expensive lesson in the tree. `__thread` means per *thread*, and the compiler
> is entitled to read the thread pointer once and keep it in a register across