Re: [POC][RFC][PATCH 1/2] jump_function: Addition of new feature "jump_function"

[Steven Rostedt]

On Mon, 8 Oct 2018 09:29:56 -0700
Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > On Oct 8, 2018, at 8:57 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, Oct 08, 2018 at 01:33:14AM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:  
> >>> Can't we hijack the relocation records for these functions before they
> >>> get thrown out in the (final) link pass or something?  
> >> 
> >> I could be talking out my arse here, but I thought we could do this,
> >> too, then changed my mind.  The relocation records give us the
> >> location of the call or jump operand, but they donât give the address
> >> of the beginning of the instruction.  
> > 
> > But that's like 1 byte before the operand, right? We could even double check
> > this by reading back that byte and ensuring it is in fact 0xE8 (CALL).
> > 
> > AFAICT there is only the _1_ CALL encoding, and that is the 5 byte: E8 <PLT32>,
> > so if we have the PLT32 location, we also have the instruction location. Or am
> > I missing something?  
> 
> Thereâs also JMP and Jcc, any of which can be used for rail calls, but those are also one byte. I suppose GCC is unlikely to emit a prefixed form of any of these. So maybe we really can assume theyâre all one byte.
> 
> But there is a nasty potential special case: anything that takes the functionâs address. This includes jump tables, computed gotos, and plain old function pointers. And I suspect that any of these could have one of the rather large number of CALL/JMP/Jcc bytes before the relocation by coincidence.
> 

FYI, your email client is horrible to read from decent email clients :-p

Anyway,

I'd like to have these "dynamic functions" be "special" where they
can't be added to tables or what not. If you need to add one to a
table or function pointer, then you need to have a wrapper function
that does the call. I think we can come up with some kind of wrapper or
linker magic to enforce this too.

-- Steve