Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2016 19:16:57 +0100
From: Torsten Duwe <duwe@lst.de>
To: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Cc: linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org, Balbir Singh <bsingharora@gmail.com>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, rostedt@goodmis.org,
        kamalesh@linux.vnet.ibm.com, jeyu@redhat.com, jkosina@suse.cz,
        live-patching@vger.kernel.org, mbenes@suse.cz
Subject: Re: [PATCH][v4] livepatch/ppc: Enable livepatching on powerpc
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On Fri, Mar 04, 2016 at 02:01:37PM +0100, Petr Mladek wrote:
> 
> Do I understand it correctly that we could not patch functions that
> pass arguments on the stack with this implementation? If yes, how hard
> would be to get it working, please? At least, it would be great to
> catch this problem and handle it with grace. Otherwise, it might
> be hard to debug.

No, those functions only require special attention.
I needed _any_ location to store the caller's TOC;
and the stack is thread-safe and recursion-safe.
The current caller's frame is already full so I had
to create a new one.

A patch function could e.g. grab that TOC value in a
prologue and then pop that stack frame. Or it could
add those 32 bytes to the assumed arguments' stack offsets.

> 
> > Where shall we put this warning?
> 
> Sadly, we do not have any Documentation/livepatch/ yet/.
> I still hope that we could handle it somehow in the code.

I really think some documentation would be good, a live patch
howto for a start...

	Torsten