arm64: bti: Disable in-kernel BTI with recent versions of Clang

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The following BTI exception was seen when loading a livepatch module:

  Internal error: Oops - BTI: 0000000036000001 [#1]  SMP
  pstate: 634004c9 (nZCv daIF +PAN -UAO +TCO +DIT -SSBS BTYPE=jc)
  pc : kill_orphaned_pgrp+0x0/0x150
  lr : do_exit+0x498/0xaf0 [livepatch_combined]

The problem is that the patch module's do_exit() is branching to a
static function in vmlinux using a module PLT veneer (indirect branch),
but the target function doesn't have a BTI landing pad.

Clang 21+ omits the landing pad for static functions which can only be
reached by a direct branch.  That's normally fine for ordinary modules
which only branch to global exported functions, but Mark Brown points
out [1] that this isn't guaranteed if the module branches between
sections. Futhermore, livepatch modules use klp relocations to reference
arbitrary kernel symbols, so with CONFIG_RANDOMIZE_MODULE_REGION_FULL
the module is far enough from the kernel that every R_AARCH64_CALL26
needs a PLT.

Put Clang 21+ in the naughty corner alongside GCC, which suffers from
the same issue, by disabling CONFIG_ARM64_BTI_KERNEL until we have a
version of the toolchain with the problem resolved.

Cc: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/da06bbd3-d04b-4d0f-b331-f5b91bc373a5@sirena.org.uk [1]
Fixes: fd1e0fd71f ("arm64: Implement HAVE_LIVEPATCH")
Signed-off-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@kernel.org>
[will: Stitched together commit message, diff and bug number]
Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>

...

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Josh Poimboeuf 2026-08-11 14:11:44 +00:00 • committed by Will Deacon

parent d8fc0793cf

commit d3359af21f

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