clone: support passing tls argument via C rather than pt_regs magic

clone has some of the quirkiest syscall handling in the kernel, with a
pile of special cases, historical curiosities, and architecture-specific
calling conventions.  In particular, clone with CLONE_SETTLS accepts a
parameter "tls" that the C entry point completely ignores and some
assembly entry points overwrite; instead, the low-level arch-specific
code pulls the tls parameter out of the arch-specific register captured
as part of pt_regs on entry to the kernel.  That's a massive hack, and
it makes the arch-specific code only work when called via the specific
existing syscall entry points; because of this hack, any new clone-like
system call would have to accept an identical tls argument in exactly
the same arch-specific position, rather than providing a unified system
call entry point across architectures.

The first patch allows architectures to handle the tls argument via
normal C parameter passing, if they opt in by selecting
HAVE_COPY_THREAD_TLS.  The second patch makes 32-bit and 64-bit x86 opt
into this.

These two patches came out of the clone4 series, which isn't ready for
this merge window, but these first two cleanup patches were entirely
uncontroversial and have acks.  I'd like to go ahead and submit these
two so that other architectures can begin building on top of this and
opting into HAVE_COPY_THREAD_TLS.  However, I'm also happy to wait and
send these through the next merge window (along with v3 of clone4) if
anyone would prefer that.

This patch (of 2):

clone with CLONE_SETTLS accepts an argument to set the thread-local
storage area for the new thread.  sys_clone declares an int argument
tls_val in the appropriate point in the argument list (based on the
various CLONE_BACKWARDS variants), but doesn't actually use or pass along
that argument.  Instead, sys_clone calls do_fork, which calls
copy_process, which calls the arch-specific copy_thread, and copy_thread
pulls the corresponding syscall argument out of the pt_regs captured at
kernel entry (knowing what argument of clone that architecture passes tls
in).

Apart from being awful and inscrutable, that also only works because only
one code path into copy_thread can pass the CLONE_SETTLS flag, and that
code path comes from sys_clone with its architecture-specific
argument-passing order.  This prevents introducing a new version of the
clone system call without propagating the same architecture-specific
position of the tls argument.

However, there's no reason to pull the argument out of pt_regs when
sys_clone could just pass it down via C function call arguments.

Introduce a new CONFIG_HAVE_COPY_THREAD_TLS for architectures to opt into,
and a new copy_thread_tls that accepts the tls parameter as an additional
unsigned long (syscall-argument-sized) argument.  Change sys_clone's tls
argument to an unsigned long (which does not change the ABI), and pass
that down to copy_thread_tls.

Architectures that don't opt into copy_thread_tls will continue to ignore
the C argument to sys_clone in favor of the pt_regs captured at kernel
entry, and thus will be unable to introduce new versions of the clone
syscall.

Patch co-authored by Josh Triplett and Thiago Macieira.

Signed-off-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Acked-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/arch/Kconfig b/arch/Kconfig
index a65eafb..bec6666 100644
--- a/arch/Kconfig
+++ b/arch/Kconfig
@@ -499,6 +499,13 @@ config ARCH_HAS_ELF_RANDOMIZE
 	  - arch_mmap_rnd()
 	  - arch_randomize_brk()
 
+config HAVE_COPY_THREAD_TLS
+	bool
+	help
+	  Architecture provides copy_thread_tls to accept tls argument via
+	  normal C parameter passing, rather than extracting the syscall
+	  argument from pt_regs.
+
 #
 # ABI hall of shame
 #