Re: [PATCH] x86 page fault handler not interrupt safe

Nigel Gamble (nigel@nrg.org)
Mon, 7 May 2001 14:53:47 -0700 (PDT)


On Mon, 7 May 2001, Brian Gerst wrote:
> Nigel Gamble wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 7 May 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > On Mon, 7 May 2001, Brian Gerst wrote:
> > > > This patch will still cause the user process to seg fault: The error
> > > > code on the stack will not match the address in %cr2.
> > >
> > > You've convinced me. Good thinking. Let's do the irq thing.
> >
> > I've actually seen user processes seg faulting because of this with the
> > fully preemptible kernel patch applied. The fix we used in that patch
> > was to use an interrupt gate for the fault handler, then to simply
> > restore the interrupt state:
>
> Keep in mind that regs->eflags could be from user space, and could have
> some undesirable flags set. That's why I did a test/sti instead of

Good point.

> reloading eflags. Plus my patch leaves interrupts disabled for the
> minimum time possible.

I'm not sure that it makes much difference, as interrupts are disabled
for such a short time anyway. I'd prefer to put the test/sti in
do_page_fault(), and reduce the complexity needed in assembler routines
as much as possible, for maintainability reasons.

Nigel Gamble nigel@nrg.org
Mountain View, CA, USA. http://www.nrg.org/

MontaVista Software nigel@mvista.com

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