Re: livepatch: reuse module loader code to write relocations

+++ Petr Mladek [17/12/15 16:45 +0100]:

On Wed 2015-12-16 00:40:48, Jessica Yu wrote:

quoted

Turns out the string parsing stuff, even with the help of lib/string.c, doesn't
look very pretty. As I'm working on v3, I'm starting to think having
klp_write_object_relocations() loop simply through all the elf sections might
not be a good idea. Let me explain.

I don't like the amount of string manipulation code that would potentially come
with this change. Even with a string as simple as ".klp.rela.objname", we'll
end up with a bunch of kstrdup's/kmalloc's and kfree's (unless we modify and
chop the section name string in place, which I don't think we should do) that
are going to be required at every iteration of the loop, all just to be able to
call strcmp() and see if we're dealing with a klp rela section that belongs to
the object in question. This also leads to more complicated error handling.

I do not think that we need to allocate and free buffers every time
we compare a substring.

One possibility is to find the position of the substring using
strchr(). Then you could compare it using strncmp() and pass there
the pointer where the substring begins.

Hm, yes you're right. Specifically, it looks like strcspn() would also
be useful for this situation (i.e. calculate the length of a substring
that does not contain certain characters); combined with strncmp(),
this should make the string code much simpler, and no more buffer
allocating/freeing. :-)

Jessica