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

@ -157,15 +157,37 @@ trapret:
# -----------------------------------------------------------------------
.global syscall_entry
syscall_entry:
# Swap FS_BASE to kernel value BEFORE any %fs: access.
# Save rax/rcx/rdx to single-CPU scratch globals (IF is off, no race).
movq %rax, _sc_rax(%rip)
movq %rcx, _sc_rcx(%rip) # user rip (SYSCALL stores it here)
movq %rdx, _sc_rdx(%rip)
# Swap FS_BASE to the kernel value BEFORE any %fs: access. wrmsr destroys
# rax, rcx and rdx, so they have to be parked somewhere first -- not on the
# user stack, which is untrusted and has not been switched away from yet.
#
# **Per CPU, at %gs:32..48.** These were 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 whatever about a second CPU executing these same three stores at
# the same moment -- and with two processors entering syscalls
# concurrently, that is not a rare interleaving, it is the common 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 to *the other process's* instruction pointer. The symptom was
# one to three processes per boot dying at `rip 0x0` or dereferencing
# 0xffffffffffffffea (-EINVAL, a syscall return value used as a pointer,
# because %rax was swapped too) -- never on -smp 1, one to three times on
# -smp 2, and in any process rather than one.
#
# %gs is usable here, before the FS swap, for the same reason
# RESTORE_KERNEL_FS can read %gs:0: GS base is per-CPU in hardware, is set
# once by seginit(), and userspace cannot change it -- sys_arch_prctl()
# implements ARCH_SET_FS and ARCH_GET_FS and rejects ARCH_SET_GS.
movq %rax, %gs:32
movq %rcx, %gs:40 # user rip (SYSCALL stores it here)
movq %rdx, %gs:48
RESTORE_KERNEL_FS # clobbers rax, rcx, rdx — that's OK
movq _sc_rax(%rip), %rax
movq _sc_rcx(%rip), %rcx
movq _sc_rdx(%rip), %rdx
movq %gs:32, %rax
movq %gs:40, %rcx
movq %gs:48, %rdx
# Switch to kernel stack: store user rsp at top of proc->kstack.
#