Re: [PATCHv4 0/3] Kernel Live Patching

Josh Poimboeuf
2014-11-26T15:28:38Z

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 10:18:24AM +0100, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Nov 2014, Masami Hiramatsu wrote:
>
> > > Note to Steve:
> > > Masami's IPMODIFY patch is heading for -next via your tree. Once it arrives,
> > > I'll rebase and make the change to set IPMODIFY. Do not pull this for -next
> > > yet. This version (v4) is for review and gathering acks.
> >
> > BTW, as we discussed IPMODIFY is an exclusive flag. So if we allocate
> > ftrace_ops for each function in each patch, it could be conflict each
> > other.
>
> Yup, this corresponds to what Petr brought up yesterday. There are cases
> where all solutions (kpatch, kgraft, klp) would allocate multiple
> ftrace_ops for a single function entry (think of patching one function
> multiple times in a row).
>
> So it's not as easy as just setting the flag.
>
> > Maybe we need to have another ops hashtable to find such conflict and
> > new handler to handle it.
>
> If I understand your proposal correctly, that would sound like a hackish
> workaround, trying to basically trick the IPMODIFY flag semantics you just
> implemented :)

I think Masami may be proposing something similar to what we do in
kpatch today. We have a single ftrace_ops and handler which is used for
all functions. The handler accesses a global hash of kpatch_func
structs which is indexed by the original function's IP address.

It actually works out pretty well because it nicely encapsulates the
knowledge about which functions are patched in a single place. And it
makes it easy to track function versions (for incremental patching and
rollback).

> What I'd propose instead is to make sure that we always have
> just a ftrace_ops per function entry, and only update the pointers there
> as necessary. Fortunately we can do the switch atomically, by making use
> of ->private.

But how would you update multiple functions atomically, to enforce
per-thread consistency?

--
Josh