From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752273AbaEAV2J (ORCPT ); Thu, 1 May 2014 17:28:09 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:36475 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751736AbaEAV2G (ORCPT ); Thu, 1 May 2014 17:28:06 -0400 Date: Thu, 1 May 2014 16:27:46 -0500 From: Josh Poimboeuf To: Andi Kleen Cc: Seth Jennings , Masami Hiramatsu , Steven Rostedt , Frederic Weisbecker , Ingo Molnar , Jiri Slaby , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] kpatch: dynamic kernel patching Message-ID: <20140501212746.GD3907@treble.redhat.com> References: <87ppjxcjo2.fsf@tassilo.jf.intel.com> <20140501210154.GC3907@treble.redhat.com> <20140501210601.GG2382@two.firstfloor.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20140501210601.GG2382@two.firstfloor.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2012-12-30) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, May 01, 2014 at 11:06:01PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote: > > When bar returns, would it skip foo and go straight back to foo's > > caller? If so, then it should be safe to patch foo after it jumps to > > bar. > > foo is no problem, you see it in the backtrace. > But you don't see bar. Sorry, I missed your point the first time. Good question. stop_machine schedules a high priority thread on each CPU, which means every other task will be waiting in a schedule() call (assuming a non-preemptible kernel). In my local kernel, a quick grep of the disassembly doesn't show any jumps to schedule: $ egrep 'j.*<.*>' vmlinux.asm |grep -v '\+' |grep schedule ffffffff816b89b5: e9 e2 fe ff ff jmpq ffffffff816b889c ffffffff816b8cec: 75 1e jne ffffffff816b8d0c But yes, that would be a problem if any tail call jumps to schedule() ever showed up. We may need to detect that case in our patch generation tooling and fail to create the patch module binary if the patch affects a function which does this. -- Josh