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

@ -80,6 +80,9 @@ extern int ncpu_online; // processors actually running
// +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
//
// Offset 8 is NOT free. syscall_entry uses %fs:(8) as its scratch slot, and
// because seginit() sets GS base and FS base to the same address, %fs:8 and
@ -87,12 +90,23 @@ extern int ncpu_online; // processors actually running
// it with %rsp -- a #GP in syscall_entry itself, several layers below anything
// that could report it.
//
// trapasm.S reads %gs:24 for proc on the way out to user mode, so these three
// offsets are shared with assembly and must not be reordered.
// **Offsets 32..48 were three globals**, `_sc_rax`/`_sc_rcx`/`_sc_rdx` in
// vm.c, under a comment saying they were safe because SYSCALL clears IF. IF
// answers for interrupts on *this* CPU and says nothing about another CPU
// executing the same three stores. Two CPUs entering a syscall together
// overwrote each other's parked registers, and %rcx is the user return address
// that sysretq uses -- so one process returned into another's instruction
// stream. See the note on syscall_entry in trapasm.S.
//
// trapasm.S reads all of these, so the offsets are shared with assembly and
// must not be reordered.
#define PERCPU_SELF 0
#define PERCPU_SCRATCH 8
#define PERCPU_CPU 16
#define PERCPU_PROC 24
#define PERCPU_SC_RAX 32
#define PERCPU_SC_RCX 40
#define PERCPU_SC_RDX 48
static inline struct cpu *
cpu_get(void)