Re: [PATCH v7 0/4] arm64: Enable BTI for the executable as well as the interpreter

[Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>]

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On Thu, Jan 06, 2022 at 06:13:37PM +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 06, 2022 at 10:09:35AM -0600, Jeremy Linton wrote:

> > This should only change the behavior for for binaries which conform to the
> > new ABI containing the BTI note. So outside of the tiny window of things
> > built with BTI, but run on !BTI hardware or older kernel+glibc, this
> > shouldn't be a problem. (Unless i'm missing something) Put another way, now
> > is the time to make a change, before there is a legacy BTI ecosystem we have
> > to deal with.

> The concern is that the loader may decide in the future to not enable
> (or turn off) BTI for some reason (e.g. mixed libraries, old glibc on
> BTI hardware). If we force BTI on the main executable, we'd take this
> option away. Note also that it's not only glibc here, there are other
> loaders.

Neither of those examples should be concerns - BTI is per page so you
can mix BTI and non-BTI freely in a process (as will happen now for the
case where the dynamic loader is built for BTI but the main executable
is not, and the dynamic loader should do if there's a mix of BTI and
non-BTI libraries).  The main case where there might be a change would
be the case where there's individual excutables with incorrect BTI
annotations which are run under this seccomp MWDE, then the dynamic
loader might have support for disabling BTI based on some configuration
but wouldn't be able to due to the MWDE.

Note also that we're only taking the option of disabiling BTI away in
the case where there's something like this seccomp filter disabling
permission changes.

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