published May 1, 2025
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
x86/fpu: Drop fpregs lock before inheriting FPU permissions
Mike Galbraith reported the following against an old fork of preempt-rt
but the same issue also applies to the current preempt-rt tree.
BUG: sleeping function called from invalid context at kernel/locking/spinlock_rt.c:46
in_atomic(): 1, irqs_disabled(): 0, non_block: 0, pid: 1, name: systemd
preempt_count: 1, expected: 0
RCU nest depth: 0, expected: 0
Preemption disabled at:
fpu_clone
CPU: 6 PID: 1 Comm: systemd Tainted: G E (unreleased)
Call Trace:
<TASK>
dump_stack_lvl
? fpu_clone
__might_resched
rt_spin_lock
fpu_clone
? copy_thread
? copy_process
? shmem_alloc_inode
? kmem_cache_alloc
? kernel_clone
? __do_sys_clone
? do_syscall_64
? __x64_sys_rt_sigprocmask
? syscall_exit_to_user_mode
? do_syscall_64
? syscall_exit_to_user_mode
? do_syscall_64
? syscall_exit_to_user_mode
? do_syscall_64
? exc_page_fault
? entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe
</TASK>
Mike says:
The splat comes from fpu_inherit_perms() being called under fpregs_lock(),
and us reaching the spin_lock_irq() therein due to fpu_state_size_dynamic()
returning true despite static key __fpu_state_size_dynamic having never
been enabled.
Mike's assessment looks correct. fpregs_lock on a PREEMPT_RT kernel disables
preemption so calling spin_lock_irq() in fpu_inherit_perms() is unsafe. This
problem exists since commit
9e798e9aa14c ("x86/fpu: Prepare fpu_clone() for dynamically enabled features").
Even though the original bug report should not have enabled the paths at
all, the bug still exists.
fpregs_lock is necessary when editing the FPU registers or a task's FP
state but it is not necessary for fpu_inherit_perms(). The only write
of any FP state in fpu_inherit_perms() is for the new child which is
not running yet and cannot context switch or be borrowed by a kernel
thread yet. Hence, fpregs_lock is not protecting anything in the new
child until clone() completes and can be dropped earlier. The siglock
still needs to be acquired by fpu_inherit_perms() as the read of the
parent's permissions has to be serialised.
[ bp: Cleanup splat. ]