linux-user: Provide safe_syscall for fixing races between signals and syscalls

If a signal is delivered immediately before a blocking system call the
handler will only be called after the system call returns, which may be a
long time later or never.

This is fixed by using a function (safe_syscall) that checks if a guest
signal is pending prior to making a system call, and if so does not call the
system call and returns -TARGET_ERESTARTSYS. If a signal is received between
the check and the system call host_signal_handler() rewinds execution to
before the check. This rewinding has the effect of closing the race window
so that safe_syscall will reliably either (a) go into the host syscall
with no unprocessed guest signals pending or or (b) return
-TARGET_ERESTARTSYS so that the caller can deal with the signals.
Implementing this requires a per-host-architecture assembly language
fragment.

This will also resolve the mishandling of the SA_RESTART flag where
we would restart a host system call and not call the guest signal handler
until the syscall finally completed -- syscall restarting now always
happens at the guest syscall level so the guest signal handler will run.
(The host syscall will never be restarted because if the host kernel
rewinds the PC to point at the syscall insn for a restart then our
host_signal_handler() will see this and arrange the guest PC rewind.)

This commit contains the infrastructure for implementing safe_syscall
and the assembly language fragment for x86-64, but does not change any
syscalls to use it.

Signed-off-by: Timothy Edward Baldwin <T.E.Baldwin99@members.leeds.ac.uk>
Message-id: 1441497448-32489-14-git-send-email-T.E.Baldwin99@members.leeds.ac.uk
[PMM:
 * Avoid having an architecture if-ladder in configure by putting
   linux-user/host/$(ARCH) on the include path and including
   safe-syscall.inc.S from it
 * Avoid ifdef ladder in signal.c by creating new hostdep.h to hold
   host-architecture-specific things
 * Added copyright/license header to safe-syscall.inc.S
 * Rewrote commit message
 * Added comments to safe-syscall.inc.S
 * Changed calling convention of safe_syscall() to match syscall()
   (returns -1 and host error in errno on failure)
 * Added a long comment in qemu.h about how to use safe_syscall()
   to implement guest syscalls.
]
RV: squashed Peters "fixup! linux-user: compile on non-x86-64 hosts"
patch
Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/linux-user/host/generic/hostdep.h b/linux-user/host/generic/hostdep.h
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..cfabc3590b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/linux-user/host/generic/hostdep.h
@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+/*
+ * hostdep.h : fallback generic version of header for things
+ * which are dependent on the host architecture
+ *
+ *  * Written by Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
+ *
+ * Copyright (C) 2016 Linaro Limited
+ *
+ * This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 2 or later.
+ * See the COPYING file in the top-level directory.
+ */
+
+#ifndef QEMU_HOSTDEP_H
+#define QEMU_HOSTDEP_H
+
+/* This is the fallback header which is only used if the host
+ * architecture doesn't provide one in linux-user/host/$ARCH.
+ */
+
+#endif