Pull thread fix from Christian Brauner:
"This contains a single fix for all exported legacy fork helpers to
block accidental access to clone3() features in the upper 32 bits of
their respective flags arguments.
I got Cced on a glibc issue where someone reported consistent failures
for the legacy clone() syscall on ppc64le when sign extension was
performed (since the clone() syscall in glibc exposes the flags
argument as an int whereas the kernel uses unsigned long).
The legacy clone() syscall is odd in a bunch of ways and here two
things interact:
- First, legacy clone's flag argument is word-size dependent, i.e.
it's an unsigned long whereas most system calls with flag arguments
use int or unsigned int.
- Second, legacy clone() ignores unknown and deprecated flags.
The two of them taken together means that users on 64bit systems can
pass garbage for the upper 32bit of the clone() syscall since forever
and things would just work fine.
The following program compiled on a 64bit kernel prior to v5.7-rc1
will succeed and will fail post v5.7-rc1 with EBADF:
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
pid_t pid;
/* Note that legacy clone() has different argument ordering on
* different architectures so this won't work everywhere.
*
* Only set the upper 32 bits.
*/
pid = syscall(__NR_clone, 0xffffffff00000000 | SIGCHLD,
NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL);
if (pid < 0)
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
if (pid == 0)
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
if (wait(NULL) != pid)
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
Since legacy clone() couldn't be extended this was not a problem so
far and nobody really noticed or cared since nothing in the kernel
ever bothered to look at the upper 32 bits.
But once we introduced clone3() and expanded the flag argument in
struct clone_args to 64 bit we opened this can of worms. With the
first flag-based extension to clone3() making use of the upper 32 bits
of the flag argument we've effectively made it possible for the legacy
clone() syscall to reach clone3() only flags on accident. The sign
extension scenario is just the odd corner-case that we needed to
figure this out.
The reason we just realized this now and not already when we
introduced CLONE_CLEAR_SIGHAND was that CLONE_INTO_CGROUP assumes that
a valid cgroup file descriptor has been given - whereas
CLONE_CLEAR_SIGHAND doesn't need to verify anything. It just silently
resets the signal handlers to SIG_DFL.
So the sign extension (or the user accidently passing garbage for the
upper 32 bits) caused the CLONE_INTO_CGROUP bit to be raised and the
kernel to error out when it didn't find a valid cgroup file
descriptor.
Note, I'm also capping kernel_thread()'s flag argument mainly because
none of the new features make sense for kernel_thread() and we
shouldn't risk them being accidently activated however unlikely. If we
wanted to, we could even make kernel_thread() yell when an unknown
flag has been set which it doesn't do right now. But it's not worth
risking this in a bugfix imho"
* tag 'for-linus-2020-05-13' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/brauner/linux:
fork: prevent accidental access to clone3 features