Thread (27 messages) 27 messages, 5 authors, 2022-12-13

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

From: Christophe Leroy <hidden>
Date: 2022-12-09 18:52:07
Also in: live-patching, lkml


Le 09/12/2022 à 19:30, Song Liu a écrit :
On Fri, Dec 9, 2022 at 4:55 AM Miroslav Benes [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
Hi,

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

On Thu, 1 Sep 2022, Song Liu wrote:
quoted
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 <redacted>
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.
I don't have test environments for s390 and powerpc, so I really don't know
whether I am doing something sane for them.

Would you have time to finish these parts? (Or maybe the whole patch..)
Setting up a powerpc test environment is fairly easy with QEMU.

Some information below:
- https://github.com/linuxppc/wiki/wiki
- https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Platforms/PowerPC

Christophe
Keyboard shortcuts
hback out one level
jnext message in thread
kprevious message in thread
ldrill in
Escclose help / fold thread tree
?toggle this help