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Today I wanted to give it a try to 3.14.19 + grsec and Xen (specifically an AWS instance) and it crashes on boot. What is interesting, I think, is that it crashes rather I had grsec enabled at all or not.

Here is the config files, crash logs and vmlinux of both, with fully AUTO Xen Guest grsec config and one with the patch applied but completely disabled. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6WVap ... sp=sharing

Any insights are very much welcomed and whatever I can do to help I will of course.

Thanks,
pablo.

quota exceeded... can you put it somewhere else or just mail it to me?

it seems that the first entry in level2_ident_pgt points to some empty page which makes some lowmem unavailable without the kernel knowing about it... no idea how that happens though. also does your host enable auto_translated_physmap?

I'm not really sure what auto_translated_physmap is but I can tell you I'm trying on an AWS m3.medium instance and according to this script https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brend ... eatures.pl, it's not using that.

# ./xen-features.pl
Xen features: 000000f0
enabled: pae_pgdir_above_4gb
enabled: mmu_pt_update_preserve_ad

I'm following up on this bug with my latest tests.

First of all: this is NOT a PaX bug, it also happens on upstream kernel, so sorry for posting here, I missed that test while trying to assess the problem (I didn't think upstream would break Xen support ).

After a thousand bisects and .config tests I found that the problem is related to CONFIG_RANDOMIZE_BASE (if I disable only that and keep the rest of my config the problem goes away) and I think it's related to this commit from Kees Cook:

commit 6145cfe394a7f138f6b64491c5663f97dba12450
Author: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Date: Thu Oct 10 17:18:18 2013 -0700
x86, kaslr: Raise the maximum virtual address to -1 GiB on x86_64

On 64-bit, this raises the maximum location to -1 GiB (from -1.5 GiB),
the upper limit currently, since the kernel fixmap page mappings need
to be moved to use the other 1 GiB (which would be the theoretical
limit when building with -mcmodel=kernel).

Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1381450698-287 ... romium.org
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>


The default RANDOMIZE_BASE_MAX_OFFSET for 64bits is 0x40000000, which is then used as the KERNEL_IMAGE_SIZE because of:
+#define KERNEL_IMAGE_SIZE_DEFAULT (512 * 1024 * 1024)
+#if defined(CONFIG_RANDOMIZE_BASE) && \
+ CONFIG_RANDOMIZE_BASE_MAX_OFFSET > KERNEL_IMAGE_SIZE_DEFAULT
+#define KERNEL_IMAGE_SIZE CONFIG_RANDOMIZE_BASE_MAX_OFFSET
+#else
+#define KERNEL_IMAGE_SIZE KERNEL_IMAGE_SIZE_DEFAULT
+#endif

which is then used here:
NEXT_PAGE(level2_kernel_pgt)
/*
* 512 MB kernel mapping. We spend a full page on this pagetable
* anyway.
*
* The kernel code+data+bss must not be bigger than that.
*
* (NOTE: at +512MB starts the module area, see MODULES_VADDR.
* If you want to increase this then increase MODULES_VADDR
* too.)
*/
PMDS(0, __PAGE_KERNEL_LARGE_EXEC,
KERNEL_IMAGE_SIZE/PMD_SIZE)

but as KERNEL_IMAGE_SIZE is now 1Gb this is not true anymore right? (it's not a 512 MB mapping I mean). Perhaps that's the reason for that level2_ident_pgt pointing to an empty page, some calculation seems off.

I confirmed that maintaining the RANDOMIZE_BASE but changing the MAX_OFFSET to 0x20000000 fixes the crash.

Not sure why it only affects Xen though, I guess there's something else going on that I'm missing.

Thanks again!

Hi,

I think your problem might be this issue that was recently fixed upstream?
https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/8/29/317

-Brad

YES, that's it. I got close enough . Xen worked only as long as the kernel image was on those first 512M, which I forced by setting the MAX_OFFSET to 0x20000000.

I'll try that patch and see how it goes.

Thank you for the info!

pablo.