Re: [musl] mips32 little endian -ENOSYS is not -(-ENOSYS)

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 02:19:31AM +0100, Andreas Dröscher wrote:
> Am 11.03.20 um 01:55 schrieb Rich Felker:
> >On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 10:10:15PM +0100, Andreas Dröscher wrote:
> >>Hi
> >>
> >>I'm building a new toolchain for a very old hardware with a very old
> >>Linux Kernel (2.6.20). The CPU is a Alchemy (now AMD) AU1100
> >>(production was discontinued).
> >>
> >>Obviously the Kernel lacks a lot of the modern system calls. I
> >>however expect the general system call interface to be consistent.
> >>Moreover, musl has fallbacks for many system-calls in place, kudos!
> >>However, the fallback is never triggered. I will present the issue
> >>on one example (epoll):
> >>
> >>excerpt from src/linux/epoll.c:
> >>int epoll_create1(int flags)
> >>{
> >>int r = __syscall(SYS_epoll_create1, flags);
> >>#ifdef SYS_epoll_create
> >>if (r==-ENOSYS && !flags) r = __syscall(SYS_epoll_create, 1);
> >>#endif
> >>return __syscall_ret(r);
> >>}
> >>
> >>If r is -89 (negative ENOSYS) the fallback is triggered else the
> >>result is returned as it is. However, in my case __syscall returnes
> >>89 (positive ENOSYS).
> >>I've tracked the return into the kernel and there the negative value
> >>is returned. The Kernel additionally sets r7 to 1.
> >>
> >>excerpt from arch/mips/syscall_arch.h:
> >>static inline long __syscall1(long n, long a)
> >>{
> >>register long r4 __asm__("$4") = a;
> >>register long r7 __asm__("$7");
> >>register long r2 __asm__("$2") = n;
> >>__asm__ __volatile__ (
> >>"syscall"
> >>: "+r"(r2), "=r"(r7)
> >>: "r"(r4)
> >>: SYSCALL_CLOBBERLIST, "$8", "$9", "$10");
> >>return r7 ? -r2 : r2;
> >>}
> >>
> >>I assume the "bug" is triggered by __syscall1 If r7 is set it will
> >>change the sign of r2. I can patch that by replacing:
> >>return r7 ? -r2 : r2;
> >>with
> >>return (r7 && r2 > 0) ? -r2 : r2;
> >>
> >>However I've no idea if I'm triggering any side effects or if I
> >>selected the wrong implementation for my architecture.
> >
> >It sounds like what you're saying is that the ENOSYS codepath for
> >mips, at least on your old kernel, is not setting the error flag in r7
> >and returning ENOSYS in r2, but is instead returning -ENOSYS already
> >(and not clear whether it's setting r7 at all or just leaving a stale
> >value there).
> >
> >Can anyone else confirm this, or point to kernel history that might
> >suggest it's a real bug? Your workaround looks like it should at least
> >be *safe* to do, and probably the right thing if this was/is a real
> >kernel bug in the official kernel rather than something some vendor
> >broke in their fork.
> >
> >Rich
> >
> 
> Sorry for not including that excerpt in the first place:
> 
> illegal_syscall:
> 	li	v0, -ENOSYS			# error
> 	sw	v0, PT_R2(sp)
> 	li	t0, 1				# set error flag
> 	sw	t0, PT_R7(sp)
> 	j	o32_syscall_exit
> 	END(handle_sys)
> 
> Source: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/62d0cfcb27cf755cebdc93ca95dabc83608007cd/arch/mips/kernel/scall32-o32.S#L186

OK, this was fixed by commit bda8229bdd087167f463ad5e74299987924f8137
in 2008. But it looks like there's still another path, called
"einval" from before commit fb498e2570eedc6c9c3d165e370624dfc3aed97b,
that returns -ENOSYS. All of this is awful, and I think your fix is
probably the right thing to do.

Rich