Re: ftrace introduces instability into kernel 2.6.27(-rc2,-rc3)

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt
Date: Mon Aug 18 2008 - 22:40:23 EST



> Hmm, this was originally copied from x86, where we did a cmpxchg, but that
> is probably not needed since all of this is done in kstop_machine. Also,
> only the "get" is needed. If we don't fault there, we wont fault on the
> put (unless we have permissions wrong, and that would be a bug).

Would it ? How do we make sure the kernel text is mapped writeable ?

> So are you recommending something like
>
> int cmd;
>
> if (__get_user(cmd, ip))
> goto fault;
>
> if (cmd != old)
> goto not_same;
>
> WARN_ON_ONCE(__put_user(cmd, ip));
>
> If we did this, we could probably put this into the generic code:

That would work I suppose, I'll give it a try.

> if (copy_from_user(cmd, ip, ARCH_CALL_SIZE))
> goto fault;
>
> if (memcmp(cmd, old, ARCH_CALL_SIZE) != 0)
> goto not_same;
>
> WARN_ON_ONCE(copy_to_user(cmd, ip, ARCH_CALL_SIZE));

You need the __ variants or the access_ok() checks will bite
you bad.

Ben.


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