[U-Boot] [PATCH] riscv: increase stack size to avoid a stack overflow during distro boot

Lukas Auer lukas.auer at aisec.fraunhofer.de
Sun Oct 20 18:53:47 UTC 2019


This fixes a problem, where booting Linux using distro boot will
sometimes lead to an invalid instruction exception on the main hart. The
secondary harts are not affected and boot Linux successfully. The root
cause of this problem is a stack overflow on the main hart.

With distro boot, the current default stack size of 8KiB on RISC-V is
not sufficient and will cause a stack overflow. The stacks are allocated
sequentially. In the case of a stack overflow the stack of the main hart
can reach into that of another hart and be corrupted.

The stack overflow previously did not cause any problems, because only
stack frames, which are not used anymore since the hart enters Linux,
were corrupted. Starting with GCC 9, the stack usage has decreased. Now,
only the most recent stack frame overflows into the stack of a secondary
hart and is corrupted. The illegal instruction exception is caused by
the secondary hart overwriting the return address in the stack frame of
the main hart with an address that does not include valid code.

Increase the default stack size of each hart to 16KiB to avoid this
problem.

Reported-by: Aurelien Jarno <aurelien at aurel32.net>
Signed-off-by: Lukas Auer <lukas.auer at aisec.fraunhofer.de>
Tested-by: David Abdurachmanov <david.abdurachmanov at sifive.com>
Tested-by: Aurelien Jarno <aurelien at aurel32.net>
---

 arch/riscv/Kconfig | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/arch/riscv/Kconfig b/arch/riscv/Kconfig
index 01975d7c60..85e15ebffa 100644
--- a/arch/riscv/Kconfig
+++ b/arch/riscv/Kconfig
@@ -224,7 +224,7 @@ config XIP
 
 config STACK_SIZE_SHIFT
 	int
-	default 13
+	default 14
 
 config SPL_LDSCRIPT
 	default "arch/riscv/cpu/u-boot-spl.lds"
-- 
2.21.0



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