On Fri, 2007-03-16 at 13:38 -0700, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

David Miller wrote:

quoted

Perhaps the problem can be dealt with using ELF relocations.

There is another case, discussed yesterday on netdev, where run-time
resolution of ELF relocations would be useful (for
very-very-very-read-only variables) so if it can solve this problem
too it would be nice to have a generic infrastructure for it.

That's an interesting idea.  Have you or anyone else looked at what it
would take to code up?

For this case, I guess you'd walk the relocs looking for references into
the paravirt_ops structure.  You'd need to check that was a reference
from an indirect jump or call instruction, which would identify a
patchable callsite.  The offset into the pv_ops structure would identify
which operation is involved.

I wrote a whole email on ways to do this, BUT...

Perhaps our patching code can already be vastly simplified to something
like:

#define pv_patch(call, args...) \
	asm volatile("8888:"); 
	call(args);
	asm volatile("8889:"
	 [ stuff to put 8889, 8888 and call in fixup section ]

The patching code doesn't even need to decode between those two: it
simply looks for an indirect call insn (0xff 0xd?).  If it finds more
than one, it doesn't patch.  If it only finds one, it patches.  We'll
probably hit them all just doing that.

What are the netdev requirements?

Reading Ben LaHaise's (very cool!) patch, it's not clear that using
reloc postprocessing is going to be clearer than open-coding it as he
has done.

Rusty.