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arm64: syscall: Expand the comment about ptrace and syscall(-1)
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If a task executes syscall(-1), we intercept this early and force x0 to
be -ENOSYS so that we don't need to distinguish this scenario from one
where the scno is -1 because a tracer wants to skip the system call
using ptrace. With the return value set, the return path is the same as
the skip case.

Although there is a one-line comment noting this in el0_svc_common(), it
misses out most of the detail. Expand the comment to describe a bit more
about what is going on.

Cc: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Cc: Keno Fischer <keno@juliacomputing.com>
Cc: Luis Machado <luis.machado@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
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Will Deacon committed Jul 16, 2020
1 parent 59ee987 commit 139dbe5
Showing 1 changed file with 15 additions and 1 deletion.
16 changes: 15 additions & 1 deletion arch/arm64/kernel/syscall.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -124,7 +124,21 @@ static void el0_svc_common(struct pt_regs *regs, int scno, int sc_nr,
user_exit();

if (has_syscall_work(flags)) {
/* set default errno for user-issued syscall(-1) */
/*
* The de-facto standard way to skip a system call using ptrace
* is to set the system call to -1 (NO_SYSCALL) and set x0 to a
* suitable error code for consumption by userspace. However,
* this cannot be distinguished from a user-issued syscall(-1)
* and so we must set x0 to -ENOSYS here in case the tracer doesn't
* issue the skip and we fall into trace_exit with x0 preserved.
*
* This is slightly odd because it also means that if a tracer
* sets the system call number to -1 but does not initialise x0,
* then x0 will be preserved for all system calls apart from a
* user-issued syscall(-1). However, requesting a skip and not
* setting the return value is unlikely to do anything sensible
* anyway.
*/
if (scno == NO_SYSCALL)
regs->regs[0] = -ENOSYS;
scno = syscall_trace_enter(regs);
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