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

From: Mathieu Desnoyers
Date: Mon Aug 18 2008 - 22:47:22 EST


* Steven Rostedt (rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
>
> On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
>
> >
> > > 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 ?
>
> We map it writeable if FTRACE is enabled.
>

Argh. See text_poke(). It's there exactly for this purpose on x86.

Mathieu

> >
> > > 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.
>
> Ah, good point ;-)
>
> -- Steve
>

--
Mathieu Desnoyers
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