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stackman

Simple low-level stack manipulation API and implementation for common platforms

Purpose

This library aims to provide a basic API to perfom stack manipulation on various platforms. Stack manipulation involves changing the machine stack pointer while optionally saving and restoring the stack contents.

Manipulating the stack pointer allows the implementation of continuations and long jump functionality in C. However, this invariably involves low-level assembly code, to save and restore machine registers and manipulate the stack pointer itself. Each machine platform, and tool suite, will need appropriate customization for it to work.

Various projects perform stack manipulation to provide co-routine functionality:

However, each of these perform things slightly differently and individual platform implementations have to be maintained for each of them.

This library aims to provide a simple api that can be shared among all projects that manipulate the C stack.

Additionally, it provides a set of pre-assembled libraries for the most common platforms so that no assembly steps are required by users.

Features

Simple api
- stackman_switch() is the main function.
- The caller provides a callback and context pointer to customize behaviour.
- The callback can save the stack and provide the new stack pointer.
- After the switch, the callback can restore contents of new stack.
- Application behaviour is entirely defined by the callback.
Simple implementation
- The code involving assembly is as simple as possible, allowing for straightforward implementation on most platforms.
- Complex logic and branching is delegated to the C callback.
- Custom platform code must only do three things:
  1. Save and restore volatile registers and stack state on the stack
  2. Call the callback twice with the current stack pointer
  3. Set the stack pointer to the value returned by the first callback.
Assembly support
The straightforward and application-agnostic switching allows the switching function to be implemented in full assembler. This removes the risk of inline-assembler doing any sort of unexpected things such as in-lining the function or otherwise change the assumptions that the function makes about its environment. This assembly code can be created by the in-line assembler in a controlled environment.
No dependencies
The library merely provides stack switching. It consist only of a couple of functions with no dependencies.
Stable
There is no need to add or modify functionality.
Libraries provided.
The aim is to provide pre-assembled libraries for the most popular platforms. This relieves other tools that want to do stack manipulation from doing any sort of assembly or complex linkage. Just include the headers and link to the appropriate library.

Supported platforms

The current code is distilled out of other work, with the aim of simplifying and standardizing the api. A number of ABI specifications is supported, meaning architecture and calling convention, plus archive format:

win_x86 (32 bits)
win_x64
sysv_i386 (linux)
sysv_amd64 (linux)
AAPCS (32 bit arm)
AAPCS64 (64 bit arm)

Supported toolchains:

Gnu C
clang
Microsoft Visual Studio

Other platforms can be easily adapted from both existing implementations for other projects as well as from example code provided.

Intel CET

Intel's Conontrol-Flow Enforcement Technology is incompatible with stack switching because it imploys a secondary Shadow Stack, that the user-mode program cannot modify. Unexpected return flow after a stack switch would cause the processor to fault. Because of this, we need to mark any assembly code as not CET compatible. Modern compilers are beginning to generate CET compatible objects and once supporting CPUs start to arrive, processes which consist entirely of CET compatible code may be run in such a protected environment. See https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/technical-look-control-flow-enforcement-technology.html for more information

Usage

Include stackman.h for a decleration of the stackman_switch() function and the definition of various platform specific macros. See the documentation in the header file for the various macros.
Implement switching semantics via the callback and call stackman_switch() from your program as appropriate. See tests/test.c for examples.

There are two basic ways to add the library to your project:

static library (preferred)

You link with the libstackman.a or stackman.lib libraries provided for your platform.

inlined code

You inlude stackman_impl.h in one of your .c source files to provide inline assembly.
You include stackman_impl.h in an assembly (.S) file in your project to include assembly code.
(windows) You include stackman_s.asm in an assemby (.asm) file in your project. In the case of inlined code, it can be specified to prefer in-line assembly and static linkage over separate assembly language source.

History

This works was originally inspired by Stackless Python by Christian Tismer, where the original switching code was developed.

Later projects, like gevent/greenlet have taken that idea and provided additional platform compatibility but with a different implementation, making the switching code itself incompatible.

Our work on additional stack-manipulating libraries prompted us to try to distill this functionality in its rawest form into a separate, low-level, library. Such that any project, withing to implement co-routine-like behaviour on the C-stack level, could make use of simple, stable code, that can be easily extended for additional platforms as they come along.

Cross-compilation

Linux on x86-64 can be used to cross compile for x86 and ARM targets. This is most useful to generate assembly code, e.g. when compiling src/platform/gen_asm.c

x86 requires the -m32 flag to compilers and linkers.
arm32 requires to use the arm-linux-gnueabi-* tools, including cc and linker
aarch64 requires the aarch64-linux-gnu-* tools.

The x86 tools require the gcc-multilib and g++-multilib packages to be installed. They, however, can't co-exist with the gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi or gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu packages on some distributions, and so development for these platforms may need to be done independently.

Cross compiling for x86 (32 bit) on Linux

install gcc-multilib and g++-multilib
compile gen_asm.c using gcc -m32
make using make PLATFORMFLAGS=-m32 test

Cross compiling for ARM (32 bit) on Linux

install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi and g++-arm-linux-gnueabi
install qemu-user for hardware emulation
compile gen_asm.c using arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc
make using make PLATFORM_PREFIX=arm-linux-gnueabi- EMULATOR=qemu-arm test

Cross compiling for Arm64 on Linux

install gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu and g++-aarch64-linux-gnu
install qemu-user for hardware emulation
compile using aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc
make using make PLATFORM_PREFIX=aarch64-linux-gnu- EMULATOR=qemu-arm64 test