Re: [PATCH v3 0/2] livepatch: Allocate and free shadow variables more safely

[Miroslav Benes]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2018, Petr Mladek wrote:

> Nikolai started to use shadow variables and found that list_head
> is not initialized correctly using the existing API.
> 
> The problem is that LIST_HEAD_INIT() set pointers to itself.
> klp_shadow_alloc() then copies these pointers to another location.
> 
> It would be possible to solve this by a late initialization. But
> this does not work well with klp_shadow_get_or_alloc(). Also this
> behavior is error prone. Note that list_head might be hidden in
> another structure, for example mutex.
> 
> I suggest to change the API and allow to initialize the shadow
> variables using a custom callback. I think that we have already
> talked about this but we decided to go the easier way. It seems
> that it was a bad decision.
> 
> I send also patch that add a symmetric callback to the klp_shadow_free()
> functions. It might be handy especially for klp_shadow_free_all().
> 
> 
> Changes against v2:
> 
>   + Use pr_err() instead of WARN() when ctor() fails [Josh]
>   + Some typos [Mirek]
> 
> 
> Changes against v1:
> 
>   + Rename init/free callbacks to ctor/dtor
>   + Misc update of comments and commit messages
>   + Fix sizeof() in the sample code in shadow-vars.txt
> 
> 
> Petr Mladek (2):
>   livepatch: Initialize shadow variables safely by a custom callback
>   livepatch: Allow to call a custom callback when freeing shadow
>     variables
> 
>  Documentation/livepatch/shadow-vars.txt   |  41 ++++++++----
>  include/linux/livepatch.h                 |  19 ++++--
>  kernel/livepatch/shadow.c                 | 108 ++++++++++++++++++++----------
>  samples/livepatch/livepatch-shadow-fix1.c |  43 +++++++++---
>  samples/livepatch/livepatch-shadow-fix2.c |  33 ++++-----
>  5 files changed, 163 insertions(+), 81 deletions(-)

Acked-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@xxxxxxx>

M