Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments

From	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Newsgroups	linux.kernel
Subject	Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments
Date	2016-03-08 20:10 +0100
Message-ID	<ravb3-5bg-5@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
References	(3 earlier) <randx-84x-39@gated-at.bofh.it> <rauRH-4OA-3@gated-at.bofh.it> <rauRH-4OA-5@gated-at.bofh.it> <rauRH-4OA-1@gated-at.bofh.it> <rav1n-4Sf-15@gated-at.bofh.it>
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On 03/08/16 10:50, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 8, 2016 at 10:47 AM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> wrote:
>> On 03/08/16 10:45, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>>
>>> s/modern/most, perhaps?
>>>
>>> I'm hoping that some day Bionic goes away and gets replaced by musl.
>>>
>>> Of course, musl doesn't always use fast syscalls because it needs a
>>> vdso facility that doesn't currently exist.  I'll deal with that
>>> eventually.
>>>
>>
>> You don't actually need actual DSO support to support fast system calls
>> on i386.  Even klibc uses them now, and the additional code to support
>> it is trivial.
> 
> That's not the issue.  The issue is that musl does something
> crazy^Wclever to support POSIX pthread cancellation, and it involves
> being able to tell whether a signal's ucontext points to a syscall
> and, if so, what the return address is.  This is straightforward with
> an inlined int $0x80, but doing it reliably with the current vdso
> design would requiring parsing the DWARF data, and I can't really
> blame musl for not wanting to do that.
> 
> There was a thread awhile back about adding a new vdso helper to do
> this.  I think I even had some code for it.  If I find time, I'll try
> to send patches for 4.7.
> 

As far as I know, when we get a signal the EIP always points to int
$0x80 as we don't support system call restart (being a rare case) for
the fast system calls.

	-hpa

Thread

[PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org> - 2016-03-06 18:50 +0100
  Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> - 2016-03-07 09:30 +0100
    Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> - 2016-03-07 17:40 +0100
      Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> - 2016-03-08 11:40 +0100
        Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> - 2016-03-08 19:50 +0100
          Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> - 2016-03-08 20:00 +0100
            Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> - 2016-03-08 20:10 +0100
              Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> - 2016-03-08 20:20 +0100
        Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> - 2016-03-08 19:50 +0100
          Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> - 2016-03-08 19:50 +0100
    Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> - 2016-03-07 18:10 +0100
      Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> - 2016-03-08 11:30 +0100
        Re: [PATCH] x86/entry: Improve system call entry comments Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> - 2016-03-08 19:40 +0100

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