[coreboot] [PATCH] Fix v3 GeodeLX stack and global variable pointer corruption

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 08.10.2008 02:29, Peter Stuge wrote:
> Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>   
>> Fix v3 GeodeLX stack and global variable pointer corruption.
>> We had a jump instead of a call to stage1_main in geodelx/stage0.S. That
>> means all accesses to bist and init_detected were off by 8 bytes and
>> collided with accesses to the global variable pointer.
>>     
>
> Can you explain what, if any, effect this bug had or could have had
> in practice?
>   

Sure.
1.) If gcc had decided to reload bist from stack after initializing the
global variable pointer, bist would have been nonzero, an indicator for
processor failure.
2.) If gcc had decided to use the stack location of bist as a scratch
register (and it probably is free to do so as long as the contents are
restored before returning), it would have clobbered the global variable
pointer, leading to NULL pointer dereferences.
3.) Any accesses to init_detected would have resulted in accessing 4
bytes above the top of stack (0x87ffc-0x87fff), something the rest of
the code deliberately avoids.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

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