[PATCH] vdso: randomize the i386 vDSO by moving it into a vma

Move the i386 VDSO down into a vma and thus randomize it.

Besides the security implications, this feature also helps debuggers, which
can COW a vma-backed VDSO just like a normal DSO and can thus do
single-stepping and other debugging features.

It's good for hypervisors (Xen, VMWare) too, which typically live in the same
high-mapped address space as the VDSO, hence whenever the VDSO is used, they
get lots of guest pagefaults and have to fix such guest accesses up - which
slows things down instead of speeding things up (the primary purpose of the
VDSO).

There's a new CONFIG_COMPAT_VDSO (default=y) option, which provides support
for older glibcs that still rely on a prelinked high-mapped VDSO.  Newer
distributions (using glibc 2.3.3 or later) can turn this option off.  Turning
it off is also recommended for security reasons: attackers cannot use the
predictable high-mapped VDSO page as syscall trampoline anymore.

There is a new vdso=[0|1] boot option as well, and a runtime
/proc/sys/vm/vdso_enabled sysctl switch, that allows the VDSO to be turned
on/off.

(This version of the VDSO-randomization patch also has working ELF
coredumping, the previous patch crashed in the coredumping code.)

This code is a combined work of the exec-shield VDSO randomization
code and Gerd Hoffmann's hypervisor-centric VDSO patch. Rusty Russell
started this patch and i completed it.

[akpm@osdl.org: cleanups]
[akpm@osdl.org: compile fix]
[akpm@osdl.org: compile fix 2]
[akpm@osdl.org: compile fix 3]
[akpm@osdl.org: revernt MAXMEM change]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>
Cc: Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@suse.de>
Cc: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Cc: Zachary Amsden <zach@vmware.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de>
Cc: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@novell.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/sysctl.h b/include/linux/sysctl.h
index 349ef908a22..bee12a7a057 100644
--- a/include/linux/sysctl.h
+++ b/include/linux/sysctl.h
@@ -189,6 +189,7 @@ enum
 	VM_ZONE_RECLAIM_MODE=31, /* reclaim local zone memory before going off node */
 	VM_ZONE_RECLAIM_INTERVAL=32, /* time period to wait after reclaim failure */
 	VM_PANIC_ON_OOM=33,	/* panic at out-of-memory */
+	VM_VDSO_ENABLED=34,	/* map VDSO into new processes? */
 };