x86/signal/64: Add a comment about sigcontext->fs and gs

These fields have a strange history.  This tries to document it.

This borrows from 9a036b93a344 ("x86/signal/64: Remove 'fs' and 'gs'
from sigcontext"), which was reverted by ed596cde9425 ("Revert x86
sigcontext cleanups").

Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Borislav Petkov <[email protected]>
Cc: Al Viro <[email protected]>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <[email protected]>
Cc: Brian Gerst <[email protected]>
Cc: Cyrill Gorcunov <[email protected]>
Cc: Denys Vlasenko <[email protected]>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: Stas Sergeev <[email protected]>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/baa78f3c84106fa5acbc319377b1850602f5deec.1455664054.git.luto@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>

1 files changed, 25 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/sigcontext.h b/arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/sigcontext.h
index d485232f1e9f..702c40468859 100644
--- a/arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/sigcontext.h
+++ b/arch/x86/include/uapi/asm/sigcontext.h
@@ -341,6 +341,31 @@ struct sigcontext {
 	__u64				rip;
 	__u64				eflags;		/* RFLAGS */
 	__u16				cs;
+
+	/*
+	 * Prior to 2.5.64 ("[PATCH] x86-64 updates for 2.5.64-bk3"),
+	 * Linux saved and restored fs and gs in these slots.  This
+	 * was counterproductive, as fsbase and gsbase were never
+	 * saved, so arch_prctl was presumably unreliable.
+	 *
+	 * These slots should never be reused without extreme caution:
+	 *
+	 *  - Some DOSEMU versions stash fs and gs in these slots manually,
+	 *    thus overwriting anything the kernel expects to be preserved
+	 *    in these slots.
+	 *
+	 *  - If these slots are ever needed for any other purpose,
+	 *    there is some risk that very old 64-bit binaries could get
+	 *    confused.  I doubt that many such binaries still work,
+	 *    though, since the same patch in 2.5.64 also removed the
+	 *    64-bit set_thread_area syscall, so it appears that there
+	 *    is no TLS API beyond modify_ldt that works in both pre-
+	 *    and post-2.5.64 kernels.
+	 *
+	 * If the kernel ever adds explicit fs, gs, fsbase, and gsbase
+	 * save/restore, it will most likely need to be opt-in and use
+	 * different context slots.
+	 */
 	__u16				gs;
 	__u16				fs;
 	__u16				__pad0;