Currently, as reported by Eric, an invalid si_code value 0 is
passed in many signals delivered to userspace in response to faults
and other kernel errors. Typically 0 is passed when the fault is
insufficiently diagnosable or when there does not appear to be any
sensible alternative value to choose.
This appears to violate POSIX, and is intuitively wrong for at
least two reasons arising from the fact that 0 == SI_USER:
1) si_code is a union selector, and SI_USER (and si_code <= 0 in
general) implies the existence of a different set of fields
(siginfo._kill) from that which exists for a fault signal
(siginfo._sigfault). However, the code raising the signal
typically writes only the _sigfault fields, and the _kill
fields make no sense in this case.
Thus when userspace sees si_code == 0 (SI_USER) it may
legitimately inspect fields in the inactive union member _kill
and obtain garbage as a result.
There appears to be software in the wild relying on this,
albeit generally only for printing diagnostic messages.
2) Software that wants to be robust against spurious signals may
discard signals where si_code == SI_USER (or <= 0), or may
filter such signals based on the si_uid and si_pid fields of
siginfo._sigkill. In the case of fault signals, this means
that important (and usually fatal) error conditions may be
silently ignored.
In practice, many of the faults for which arm64 passes si_code == 0
are undiagnosable conditions such as exceptions with syndrome
values in ESR_ELx to which the architecture does not yet assign any
meaning, or conditions indicative of a bug or error in the kernel
or system and thus that are unrecoverable and should never occur in
normal operation.
The approach taken in this patch is to translate all such
undiagnosable or "impossible" synchronous fault conditions to
SIGKILL, since these are at least probably localisable to a single
process. Some of these conditions should really result in a kernel
panic, but due to the lack of diagnostic information it is
difficult to be certain: this patch does not add any calls to
panic(), but this could change later if justified.
Although si_code will not reach userspace in the case of SIGKILL,
it is still desirable to pass a nonzero value so that the common
siginfo handling code can detect incorrect use of si_code == 0
without false positives. In this case the si_code dependent
siginfo fields will not be correctly initialised, but since they
are not passed to userspace I deem this not to matter.
A few faults can reasonably occur in realistic userspace scenarios,
and _should_ raise a regular, handleable (but perhaps not
ignorable/blockable) signal: for these, this patch attempts to
choose a suitable standard si_code value for the raised signal in
each case instead of 0.
arm64 was the only arch to define a BUS_FIXME code, so after this
patch nobody defines it. This patch therefore also removes the
relevant code from siginfo_layout().
Cc: James Morse <james.morse@arm.com>
Reported-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Martin <Dave.Martin@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
af40ff687b