flicker/docs/TODO.md

General things

Thread-locals

Right now we don't use any thread-local stuff in zig. This means that the application can freely decide what to do with the fs segment. If we need some thread-locals in the future we have to carefully think about how to do it.

If FSGSBASE is available we can swap out the segment real fast. If not we would need to fallback to arch_prctl which is of course a lot slower. Fortunately FSGSBASE is available since Intel IvyBridge(2012) and AMD Zen 2 Family 17H(2019) and Linux 5.9(2020).

Major things

• clone: with and without stack switching
• clone3: with and without stack switching
• fork: likely there is nothing to be done here but just to be sure, check again
• rt_sigreturn: we can't use the normal syscall interception because we push something onto the stack, so ucontext isn't on top anymore.
• /proc/self/exe: intercept calls to readlink/readlinkat with that as argument
• auxv: check if that is setup correctly and completely
• JIT support: intercept mmap, mprotect and mremap that change pages to be executable
• SIGILL patching fallback
• vdso handling

Minor things

• Cleanup: When a JIT engine frees code, our trampolines are "zombies", so over time we leak memory and also reduce the patching percentage
• Ghost page edge case: In all patch strategies, if a range spans multiple pages and we mmap the first one but can't mmap the second one we just let the first one mapped. It would be better to unmap them
• Re-entrancy for patchRegion
  • when a signal comes, while we are in that function, and we need to patch something due to the signal we will deadlock
• strict disassembly mode: currently we warn on disassembly error, provide a flag to stop instead
• Separate stack for flicker
  • when the application is run with a small stack (sigaltstack, goroutines) we might overflow especially for the patchRegion call
  • either one global stack for all to use(with a mutex) or a thread-local stack (though using fs has other problems)
• exec: option to persist across exec calls, useful for things like make
• prctl/arch_prctl: check if/what we need to intercept and change
• seccomp: check what we need to intercept and change
• modify_ldt: check what we need to intercept and change
• set_tid_address: check what we need to intercept and change
• performance optimizations for patched code? Peephole might be possible