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Date:   Tue, 17 Apr 2018 13:21:25 +0200 (CEST)
From:   Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz>
To:     Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
cc:     Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>,
        Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>,
        Joe Lawrence <joe.lawrence@redhat.com>,
        Jessica Yu <jeyu@kernel.org>, Nicolai Stange <nstange@suse.de>,
        live-patching@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/2] livepatch: Allocate and free shadow variables
 more safely
In-Reply-To: <20180416113647.25288-1-pmladek@suse.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.LSU.2.21.1804171320480.12184@pobox.suse.cz>
References: <20180416113647.25288-1-pmladek@suse.com>
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On Mon, 16 Apr 2018, Petr Mladek wrote:

> Nikolai started to use shadow variables and found that list_head
> is not initialized correctly using the existing API.
> 
> The problem is that LIST_HEAD_INIT() set pointers to itself.
> klp_shadow_alloc() then copies these pointers to another location.
> 
> It would be possible to solve this by a late initialization. But
> this does not work well with klp_shadow_get_or_alloc(). Also this
> behavior is error prone. Note that list_head might be hidden in
> another structure, for example mutex.
> 
> I suggest to change the API and allow to initialize the shadow
> variables using a custom callback. I think that we have already
> talked about this but we decided to go the easier way. It seems
> that it was a bad decision.
> 
> I send also patch that add a symmetric callback to the klp_shadow_free()
> functions. It might be handy especially for klp_shadow_free_all().
> 
> 
> Changes against v2:
> 
>   + Use pr_err() instead of WARN() when ctor() fails [Josh]
>   + Some typos [Mirek]
> 
> 
> Changes against v1:
> 
>   + Rename init/free callbacks to ctor/dtor
>   + Misc update of comments and commit messages
>   + Fix sizeof() in the sample code in shadow-vars.txt
> 
> 
> Petr Mladek (2):
>   livepatch: Initialize shadow variables safely by a custom callback
>   livepatch: Allow to call a custom callback when freeing shadow
>     variables
> 
>  Documentation/livepatch/shadow-vars.txt   |  41 ++++++++----
>  include/linux/livepatch.h                 |  19 ++++--
>  kernel/livepatch/shadow.c                 | 108 ++++++++++++++++++++----------
>  samples/livepatch/livepatch-shadow-fix1.c |  43 +++++++++---
>  samples/livepatch/livepatch-shadow-fix2.c |  33 ++++-----
>  5 files changed, 163 insertions(+), 81 deletions(-)

Acked-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz>

M