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, 12 Aug 2013 01:35:20 +0000 (18:35 -0700)
commit8148d0952b58d0664c3a3ddffbe6ded35ad4c790
tree14f07d7402a7a8d16430c3cc2f54f1339a3526c4
parent8271eb9ffaaa3390fb0478f94c88f91623b5af78
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.

Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Cc: Ashish Sangwan <ashishsangwan2@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk>
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/processor.h
arch/arm/include/uapi/asm/Kbuild
arch/arm/include/uapi/asm/a.out.h [deleted file]