Thread (5 messages) 5 messages, 4 authors, 2020-01-07

Re: BPF tracing trampoline synchronization between update/freeing and execution?

From: Alexei Starovoitov <hidden>
Date: 2020-01-06 22:29:16
Also in: bpf, lkml

On Mon, Jan 06, 2020 at 05:56:54PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
On Mon, Jan 06, 2020 at 05:39:30PM +0100, Jann Horn wrote:
quoted
Hi!

I was chatting with kpsingh about BPF trampolines, and I noticed that
it looks like BPF trampolines (as of current bpf-next/master) seem to
be missing synchronization between trampoline code updates and
trampoline execution. Or maybe I'm missing something?

If I understand correctly, trampolines are executed directly from the
fentry placeholders at the start of arbitrary kernel functions, so
they can run without any locks held. So for example, if task A starts
executing a trampoline on entry to sys_open(), then gets preempted in
the middle of the trampoline, and then task B quickly calls
BPF_RAW_TRACEPOINT_OPEN twice, and then task A continues execution,
task A will end up executing the middle of newly-written machine code,
which can probably end up crashing the kernel somehow?

I think that at least to synchronize trampoline text freeing with
concurrent trampoline execution, it is necessary to do something
similar to what the livepatching code does with klp_check_stack(), and
then either use a callback from the scheduler to periodically re-check
tasks that were in the trampoline or let the trampoline tail-call into
a cleanup helper that is part of normal kernel text. And you'd
probably have to gate BPF trampolines on
CONFIG_HAVE_RELIABLE_STACKTRACE.
ftrace uses synchronize_rcu_tasks() to flip between trampolines iirc.
good catch and good suggestion. synchronize_rcu_tasks() is needed here too.
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