On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 10:54:01AM -0800, Song Liu wrote:

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.

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 <redacted>
Originally-by: Miroslav Benes [off-list ref]
Signed-off-by: Song Liu <song@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>

Acked-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@kernel.org>

-- 
Josh