On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 03:30:04PM +0900, Masahiro Yamada wrote:

On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 8:56 PM Michal Kubecek [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

I just noticed that this patch (now in mainline as commit 8a2cc0505cc4)
drops the test if CONFIG_BPFILTER_UMH is "y" so that -static is now
passed to the linker even if bpfilter_umh is built as a module which
wasn't the case in v5.7.

This is not mentioned in the commit message and the comment still says
"*builtin* bpfilter_umh should be linked with -static" so this change
doesn't seem to be intentional. Did I miss something?

I was away for a while from this because I saw long discussion in
"net/bpfilter: Remove this broken and apparently unmaintained"


Please let me resume this topic now.


The original behavior of linking umh was like this:
  - If CONFIG_BPFILTER_UMH=y, bpfilter_umh was linked with -static
  - If CONFIG_BPFILTER_UMH=m, bpfilter_umh was linked without -static



Restoring the original behavior will add more complexity because
now we have CONFIG_CC_CAN_LINK and CONFIG_CC_CAN_LINK_STATIC
since commit b1183b6dca3e0d5

If CONFIG_BPFILTER_UMH=y, we need to check CONFIG_CC_CAN_LINK_STATIC.
If CONFIG_BPFILTER_UMH=m, we need to check CONFIG_CC_CAN_LINK.
This would make the Kconfig dependency logic too complicated.


To make it simpler, I'd like to suggest two options.



Idea 1:

  Always use -static irrespective of whether
  CONFIG_BPFILTER_UMH is y or m.

  Add two more lines to clarify this
  in the comment in net/bpfilter/Makefile:

  # builtin bpfilter_umh should be linked with -static
  # since rootfs isn't mounted at the time of __init
  # function is called and do_execv won't find elf interpreter.
  # Static linking is not required when bpfilter is modular, but
  # we always pass -static to keep the 'depends on' in Kconfig simple.

I wouldn't be very happy with this solution as that would mean adding an
extra build dependency which we don't really need. We might even
consider disabling CONFIG_BPFILTER_UMH instead.

Idea 2:

   Allow umh to become only modular,
   and drop -static flag entirely.

   If you look at net/bpfilter/Kconfig,
   BPFILTER_UMH already has 'default m'.
   So, I assume the most expected use-case
   is modular.

   My suggestion is to replace 'default m' with 'depends on m'.

   config BPFILTER_UMH
           tristate "bpfilter kernel module with user mode helper"
           depends on CC_CAN_LINK
           depends on m

   Then BPFILTER_UMH will be restricted to either m or n.
   Link umh dynamically because we can expect rootfs
   is already mounted for the module case.

This wouldn't be a problem for me or openSUSE kernels as we already have
CONFIG_BPFILTER_UMH=m. But I can't speak for others, I'm not sure if
there are some use cases requiring CONFIG_BPFILTER_UMH=y.

Michal