A device nobody holds can be claimed by anyone, so the manager now takes
every firmware-discovered device that carries mappable resources, whether or
not a driver wants it. The real gap was the HPET: an MMIO window, an IRQ, no
user-space driver, and there for the taking. Held by the manager it is
inert; unheld it was a way into physical memory.
Two deliberate exclusions. The loader's framebuffer, which the compositor
claims and which the manager must not take because it starts first. And
anything with no resources, which grants nothing worth holding.
Scope is the boot snapshot. A device reported later and matched to no driver
stays claimable — pci-cap-test and iommu-fault-test both reach an unmatched
NIC that way, so narrowing it is a separate change with those fixtures in
scope. Recorded in the plan rather than left implied.
The attacker fixture gains the assertion deferred since D2: after the system
settles, nothing with resources may be taken.
That assertion defeated itself twice before it worked, and both failures are
worth remembering. First it swept at 0.029 while the manager did not bind
its protocol until 0.047, so it reported a hole that closed a millisecond
later. The retry loop that "fixed" that was worse: the first pass TAKES the
device, so the second finds it unavailable because this process now holds
it, and concludes all is well — it passed with the manager's claiming
removed entirely. It now settles once and sweeps once, and fails when the
claiming is removed.
Suite 118/118.
The audit's sharpest finding was structural, not a bug: a fully green suite
had hidden six real defects because it contains no attacker. Every device
case asserts that a driver handed its own hardware can drive it. None asked
what a process handed NOTHING can do.
device-authority-test is that process. It is spawned with no device and
asserts what it therefore cannot do: it cannot give away a device another
task holds, nor a free one, because the kernel's rule is that you may give
away what you hold and the device's state is irrelevant to a process holding
nothing. Asserted across every device the machine actually has, so it cannot
pass by accident of which one happened to be free at boot — six on QEMU,
none of them its.
A positive control runs first. device_enumerate works from this process, so
the refusals below it are decisions rather than a syscall path that is
simply broken here; without it, "everything failed" would read identically
to "the assertions are meaningless". A nonexistent device is refused as
NoSuchDevice rather than NotHeld, because a refusal that cannot name its own
rule is what cost a debugging session on the Ryzen.
What it deliberately does not assert, and says so in its header:
device_claim is still first-come-first-served at this point in the run. That
is the hole D6 closes, and the claim half of the invariant joins this
fixture then. Asserting it now would be writing a test that documents the
bug.
Verified to discriminate: removing the holder check flips "every transfer by
a non-holder is refused" while the positive control keeps passing.
Suite 117 -> 118.
Daniel Samson