Re: Livepatch for Xen 4.9

[Ross Lagerwall <ross.lagerwall@citrix.com>]

On 10/03/2016 03:16 PM, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> Hey!
>
> [CC-ing xen-devel]
>
> Xen 4.8-rc1 is out and means taking a break from some of the Livepatch hypervisor
> parts for me.

Thanks for all the work you put in!

>
> My plan for 4.8 is to concentrate on any livepatch fallout and doing OSSTest along
> with Marcos (CC-ed) and see if we can wrestle it to expand on what
> we want to have done.
>
> However going forward (Xen 4.9) I believe the top issues we need
> to get addressed are:
>
>  a) "A better mechanism to "mask" NMIs during patching. The existing mechanism looses
>    NMI if they have been sent and we don't have a mechanism to replay them. Note that
>    this is also fixes alternative section patching. Could (like Linux) annotate handlers don't get patched."
>    (https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/LivePatch).
>  b) Restart the shrinking of code using__LINE__
>  c) When figuring out the new_addr, take into account name being <symbol>+<offset>.
>  d) Make asm code be in its own section. That eases the livepatch tools work in figuring out a change.
>     See https://lkml.org/lkml/2009/2/24/364
>  e) ?
>
>  g) Make XENPF_get_symbol also include Live Patch symbols.
>
>
> I was wondering if folks could put in their preference and what they are thinking
> to work on during 4.9?
>
>

I'm going to try implement signature verification of livepatch modules. 
The bits for signing modules are already in livepatch-build-tools, so it 
just requires the hypervisor to verify the signature. How hard can that 
be? :-)

>
>
> Also I was thinking we can drop the IRC meeting we have setup. It has been quite useful during the
> starting stage to re-sync patches but at this point I think emails are more suited?
>

Sure.

-- 
Ross Lagerwall

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