From: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz>
To: Joe Lawrence <joe.lawrence@redhat.com>
Cc: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>,
live-patching@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>,
nstange@suse.de
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Revert "kbuild: use -flive-patching when CONFIG_LIVEPATCH is enabled"
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2020 13:27:39 +0200 (CEST) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.LSU.2.21.2007211322210.31851@pobox.suse.cz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <fc7d4932-a043-1adc-fd9b-96211c508f64@redhat.com>
On Sun, 19 Jul 2020, Joe Lawrence wrote:
> On 7/17/20 2:29 PM, Josh Poimboeuf wrote:
> > Use of the new -flive-patching flag was introduced with the following
> > commit:
> >
> > 43bd3a95c98e ("kbuild: use -flive-patching when CONFIG_LIVEPATCH is
> > enabled")
> >
> > This flag has several drawbacks:
> >
> > [ ... snip ... ]
> >
> > - While there *is* a distro which relies on this flag for their distro
> > livepatch module builds, there's not a publicly documented way to
> > create safe livepatch modules with it. Its use seems to be based on
> > tribal knowledge. It serves no benefit to those who don't know how to
> > use it.
> >
> > (In fact, I believe the current livepatch documentation and samples
> > are misleading and dangerous, and should be corrected. Or at least
> > amended with a disclaimer. But I don't feel qualified to make such
> > changes.)
>
> FWIW, I'm not exactly qualified to document source-based creation either,
> however I have written a few of the samples and obviously the kselftest
> modules.
>
> The samples should certainly include a disclaimer (ie, they are only for API
> demonstration purposes!) and eventually it would be great if the kselftest
> modules could guarantee their safety as well. I don't know quite yet how we
> can automate that, but perhaps some kind of post-build sanity check could
> verify that they are in fact patching what they intend to patch.
That's a good idea. We should have something like that. I don't know how
to make it nice. Just horrible post-build hacks that would check that
modules were compiled as expected
> As for a more general, long-form warning about optimizations, I grabbed
> Miroslav's LPC slides from a few years back and poked around at some
> IPA-optimized disassembly... Here are my notes that attempt to capture some
> common cases:
>
> http://file.bos.redhat.com/~jolawren/klp-compiler-notes/livepatch/compiler-considerations.html
>
> It's not complete and I lost steam about 80% of the way through today.
> :) But if it looks useful enough to add to Documentation/livepatch, we
> can work on it on-list and try to steer folks into using the automated
> kpatch-build, objtool (eventually) or a source-based safety checklist.
It looks really useful. Could you prepare a patch and submit it, please?
We could discuss it there.
> The
> source-based steps have been posted on-list a few times, but I think it only
> needs to be formalized in a doc.
Yes, I think they were. We discussed it with Nicolai to (better) document
our workflow. It is currently based on klp-ccp
(https://github.com/SUSE/klp-ccp), but we need a proper documentation how
to prepare a live patch starting with an ordinary patch.
Thanks
Miroslav
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-07-21 11:27 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-07-17 18:29 [PATCH] Revert "kbuild: use -flive-patching when CONFIG_LIVEPATCH is enabled" Josh Poimboeuf
2020-07-20 3:35 ` Joe Lawrence
2020-07-20 8:50 ` Kamalesh Babulal
2020-07-20 11:47 ` Joe Lawrence
2020-07-21 11:27 ` Miroslav Benes [this message]
2020-07-21 11:17 ` Miroslav Benes
2020-08-06 9:24 ` Petr Mladek
2020-09-01 17:24 ` Josh Poimboeuf
2020-09-03 10:02 ` Petr Mladek
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