tcg/arm: fix branch target change during code retranslation

QEMU uses code retranslation to restore the CPU state when an exception
happens. For it to work the retranslation must not modify the generated
code. This is what is currently implemented in ARM TCG.

However on CPU that don't have icache/dcache/memory synchronised like
ARM, this requirement is stronger and code retranslation must not modify
the generated code "atomically", as the cache line might be flushed
at any moment (interrupt, exception, task switching), even if not
triggered by QEMU. The probability for this to happen is very low, and
depends on cache size and associativiy, machine load, interrupts, so the
symptoms are might happen randomly.

This requirement is currently not followed in tcg/arm, for the
load/store code, which basically has the following structure:
  1) tlb access code is written
  2) conditional fast path code is written
  3) branch is written with a temporary target
  4) slow path code is written
  5) branch target is updated
The cache lines corresponding to the retranslated code is not flushed
after code retranslation as the generated code is supposed to be the
same. However if the cache line corresponding to the branch instruction
is flushed between step 3 and 5, and is not flushed again before the
code is executed again, the branch target is wrong. In the guest, the
symptoms are MMU page fault at a random addresses, which leads to
kernel page fault or segmentation faults.

The patch fixes this issue by avoiding writing the branch target until
it is known, that is by writing only the branch instruction first, and
later only the offset.

This fixes booting linux guests on ARM hosts (tested: arm, i386, mips,
mipsel, sh4, sparc).

Acked-by: Edgar E. Iglesias <edgar.iglesias@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions