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Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2017 12:09:08 -0700
From: Jessica Yu <jeyu@redhat.com>
To: Li Bin <huawei.libin@huawei.com>
Cc: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz>,
        zhouchengming <zhouchengming1@huawei.com>,
        live-patching@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        jpoimboe@redhat.com, jikos@kernel.org, pmladek@suse.com,
        Zefan Li <lizefan@huawei.com>, Hanjun Guo <guohanjun@huawei.com>,
        duwe@suse.de
Subject: Re: [PATCH] reduce the time of finding symbols for module
Message-ID: <20170329190908.ddcybeeg6lhfscrg@jeyu>
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+++ Li Bin [29/03/17 09:50 +0800]:
>Hi,
>
>on 2017/3/29 8:03, Jessica Yu wrote:
>> +++ Miroslav Benes [28/03/17 13:16 +0200]:
>>> On Tue, 28 Mar 2017, zhouchengming wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2017/3/28 17:00, Miroslav Benes wrote:
>>>> >
>>>> > Hi,
>>>> >
>>>> > On Tue, 28 Mar 2017, Zhou Chengming wrote:
>>>> >
>>>> > > It's reported that the time of insmoding a klp.ko for one of our
>>>> > > out-tree modules is too long.
>>>> > >
>>>> > > ~ time sudo insmod klp.ko
>>>> > > real    0m23.799s
>>>> > > user    0m0.036s
>>>> > > sys    0m21.256s
>>>> >
>>>> > Is this stable through several (>=10) runs? 23 seconds are really
>>>> > suspicious. Yes, there is a linear search through all the kallsyms in
>>>> > kallsyms_on_each_symbol(), but there are something like 70k symbols on my
>>>> > machine (that is, way less than 1M). 23 seconds are somewhat unexpected.
>>>> >
>>>>
>>>> Yes, it's stable through several runs.
>>>>
>>>> I think the big reason is that our out-tree module used a lot of static local
>>>> variables. We can see '.rela.kpatch.dynrelas' contains many entries, so it
>>>> will
>>>> waste a lot of time if we use kallsyms_on_each_symbol() to find these symbols
>>>> of module.
>>>
>>> Ok, it means that you have a lot of relocation records which reference
>>> your out-of-tree module. Then for each such entry klp_resolve_symbol()
>>> is called and then klp_find_object_symbol() to actually resolve it. So if
>>> you have 20k entries, you walk through vmlinux kallsyms table 20k times.
>>> It is unneeded and that is why your fix works.
>>>
>>> But if there were 20k modules loaded, the problem would still be there.
>>>
>>> I think it would be really nice to fix kallsyms :). Replace ordinary array
>>> and the linear search with a hash table.
>>>
>>>> Relocation section '.rela.kpatch.funcs' at offset 0x382e0 contains 3 entries:
>>>>   Offset          Info           Type           Sym. Value    Sym. Name +
>>>> Addend
>>>> 000000000000  003300000101 R_AARCH64_ABS64   0000000000000000 value_show + 0
>>>> 000000000020  000b00000101 R_AARCH64_ABS64   0000000000000000 .kpatch.strings
>>>> + 8
>>>> 000000000028  000b00000101 R_AARCH64_ABS64   0000000000000000 .kpatch.strings
>>>> + 0
>>>
>>> Hm, we do not have aarch64 support in upstream (yet). There is even no
>>> dynamic ftrace with regs yet (if I am not mistaken).
>>
>> I'm curious, how was this tested? Since there is no dynamic ftrace
>> with regs and no livepatch stubs (klp_arch_set_pc, etc) implemented
>> yet for aarch64. Also, livepatch has switched from klp_relocs/dynrelas
>> to .klp.rela. sections since 4.7, so I'm curious how your patch module
>> has a .kpatch.dynrelas section working with livepatch.
>>
>> Unrelated to this patch, if there is a working aarch64 livepatch port (and
>> kpatch build tool, it seems) floating out there, it would be
>> wonderful to push that upstream :-)
>
>Yeah, from 2014, we started to work on livepatch support on aarch64, and
>in May 2015, we pushed the solution to the livepatch community[1] and gcc
>community (mfentry feature on aarch64)[2]. And then, there were an another
>gcc solution from linaro [3], which proposes to implement a new option
>-fprolog-pad=N that generate a pad of N nops at the beginning of each
>function, and AFAIK, Torsten Duwe from SUSE is still discussing this method
>with gcc community.
>
>At this stage, we are validating the livepatch support on aarch64 based on
>aarch64 mfentry feature. When the community has a clear plan, we are happy
>to make adaptation and contribute our related work to the community, including
>the kpatch-build support :-)

Thanks for the summary and update, it's very helpful. Looking forward
to those patches in the future :-)

>[1] livepatch: add support on arm64
>https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/5/28/54
>[2] [AArch64] support -mfentry feature for arm64
>https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2016-03/msg00756.html
>[3] Kernel livepatching support in GCC
>https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2015-05/msg00267.html
>[4] arm64: ftrace with regs for livepatch support
>http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2016-January/401352.html
>
>Thanks,
>Li Bin
>