ARM: 7791/1: a.out: remove partial a.out support
authorWill Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Thu, 25 Jul 2013 10:44:48 +0000 (11:44 +0100)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Mon, 14 Apr 2014 13:44:21 +0000 (06:44 -0700)
commit562c41b16c74779615db9c8cbbf01339f3a73fac
treeb1295d6267a404389c05e7a308c97ce2604dcc47
parentf3e650df41db32aeb319d4531cc9df6fba4e3c9a
ARM: 7791/1: a.out: remove partial a.out support

commit acfdd4b1f7590d02e9bae3b73bdbbc4a31b05d38 upstream.

a.out support on ARM requires that argc, argv and envp are passed in
r0-r2 respectively, which requires hacking load_aout_binary to
prevent argc being clobbered by the return code. Whilst mainline kernels
do set the registers up in start_thread, the aout loader has never
carried the hack in mainline.

Initialising the registers in this way actually goes against the libc
expectations for ELF binaries, where argc, argv and envp are passed on
the stack, with r0 being used to hold a pointer to an exit function for
cleaning up after the dynamic linker if required. If the pointer is
NULL, then it is ignored. When execing an ELF binary, Linux currently
zeroes r0, then sets it to argc and then finally clobbers it with the
return value of the execve syscall, so we actually end up with:

r0 = 0
stack[0] = argc
r1 = stack[1] = argv
r2 = stack[2] = envp

libc treats r1 and r2 as undefined. The clobbering of r0 by sys_execve
works for user-spawned threads, but when executing an ELF binary from a
kernel thread (via call_usermodehelper), the execve is performed on the
ret_from_fork path, which restores r0 from the saved pt_regs, resulting
in argc being presented to the C library. This has horrible consequences
when the application exits, since we have an exit function registered
using argc, resulting in a jump to hyperspace.

This patch solves the problem by removing the partial a.out support from
arch/arm/ altogether.

Cc: Ashish Sangwan <ashishsangwan2@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk>
[bwh: Backported to 3.2:
 - Adjust context
 - Adjust uapi filename]
Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
[yangyl: Backported to 3.4: Adjust context]
Signed-off-by: Yang Yingliang <yangyingliang@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
arch/arm/Kconfig
arch/arm/include/asm/a.out-core.h [deleted file]
arch/arm/include/asm/a.out.h [deleted file]
arch/arm/include/asm/processor.h