Re: [PATCH v6] livepatch: Clear relocation targets on a module removal

Miroslav Benes
2022-12-09T12:55:29Z

Hi,

first thank you for taking over and I also appologize for not replying
much sooner.

On Thu, 1 Sep 2022, Song Liu wrote:

> From: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz>
>
> Josh reported a bug:
>
> When the object to be patched is a module, and that module is
> rmmod'ed and reloaded, it fails to load with:
>
> module: x86/modules: Skipping invalid relocation target, existing value is nonzero for type 2, loc 00000000ba0302e9, val ffffffffa03e293c
> livepatch: failed to initialize patch 'livepatch_nfsd' for module 'nfsd' (-8)
> livepatch: patch 'livepatch_nfsd' failed for module 'nfsd', refusing to load module 'nfsd'
>
> The livepatch module has a relocation which references a symbol
> in the _previous_ loading of nfsd. When apply_relocate_add()
> tries to replace the old relocation with a new one, it sees that
> the previous one is nonzero and it errors out.
>
> On ppc64le, we have a similar issue:
>
> module_64: livepatch_nfsd: Expected nop after call, got e8410018 at e_show+0x60/0x548 [livepatch_nfsd]
> livepatch: failed to initialize patch 'livepatch_nfsd' for module 'nfsd' (-8)
> livepatch: patch 'livepatch_nfsd' failed for module 'nfsd', refusing to load module 'nfsd'
>
> He also proposed three different solutions. We could remove the error
> check in apply_relocate_add() introduced by commit eda9cec4c9a1
> ("x86/module: Detect and skip invalid relocations"). However the check
> is useful for detecting corrupted modules.
>
> We could also deny the patched modules to be removed. If it proved to be
> a major drawback for users, we could still implement a different
> approach. The solution would also complicate the existing code a lot.
>
> We thus decided to reverse the relocation patching (clear all relocation
> targets on x86_64). The solution is not
> universal and is too much arch-specific, but it may prove to be simpler
> in the end.
>
> Reported-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
> Signed-off-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz>
> Signed-off-by: Song Liu <song@kernel.org>

Petr has commented on the code aspects. I will just add that s390x was not
dealt with at the time because there was no live patching support for
s390x back then if I remember correctly and my notes do not lie. The same
applies to powerpc32. I think that both should be fixed as well with this
patch. It might also help to clean up the ifdeffery in the patch a bit.

Miroslav