Re: [PATCH bpf] bpf: Don't WARN_ON_ONCE in bpf_bprintf_prepare

[Andrii Nakryiko]

On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 1:00 PM Daniel Borkmann <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 5/5/21 8:55 PM, Andrii Nakryiko wrote:
> > On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 9:23 AM Florent Revest <revest@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>
> >> The bpf_seq_printf, bpf_trace_printk and bpf_snprintf helpers share one
> >> per-cpu buffer that they use to store temporary data (arguments to
> >> bprintf). They "get" that buffer with try_get_fmt_tmp_buf and "put" it
> >> by the end of their scope with bpf_bprintf_cleanup.
> >>
> >> If one of these helpers gets called within the scope of one of these
> >> helpers, for example: a first bpf program gets called, uses
> >
> > Can we afford having few struct bpf_printf_bufs? They are just 512
> > bytes, so can we have 3-5 of them? Tracing low-level stuff isn't the
> > only situation where this can occur, right? If someone is doing
> > bpf_snprintf() and interrupt occurs and we run another BPF program, it
> > will be impossible to do bpf_snprintf() or bpf_trace_printk() from the
> > second BPF program, etc. We can't eliminate the probability, but
> > having a small stack of buffers would make the probability so
> > miniscule as to not worry about it at all.
> >
> > Good thing is that try_get_fmt_tmp_buf() abstracts all the details, so
> > the changes are minimal. Nestedness property is preserved for
> > non-sleepable BPF programs, right? If we want this to work for
> > sleepable we'd need to either: 1) disable migration or 2) instead of

oh wait, we already disable migration for sleepable BPF progs, so it
should be good to do nestedness level only

> > assuming a stack of buffers, do a loop to find unused one. Should be
> > acceptable performance-wise, as it's not the fastest code anyway
> > (printf'ing in general).
> >
> > In any case, re-using the same buffer for sort-of-optional-to-work
> > bpf_trace_printk() and probably-important-to-work bpf_snprintf() is
> > suboptimal, so seems worth fixing this.
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> Yes, agree, it would otherwise be really hard to debug. I had the same
> thought on why not allowing nesting here given users very likely expect
> these helpers to just work for all the contexts.
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel