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From:   Arvind Sankar <nivedita@alum.mit.edu>
Date:   Fri, 13 Mar 2020 00:58:54 -0400
To:     Arvind Sankar <nivedita@alum.mit.edu>
Cc:     Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>,
        Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>,
        "H . Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>, x86@kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>,
        Nathan Chancellor <natechancellor@gmail.com>,
        Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 2/2] x86/purgatory: Make sure we fail the build if
 purgatory.ro has missing symbols
Message-ID: <20200313045853.GA1172167@rani.riverdale.lan>
References: <20200311214601.18141-1-hdegoede@redhat.com>
 <20200311214601.18141-3-hdegoede@redhat.com>
 <20200312001006.GA170175@rani.riverdale.lan>
 <3d58e77d-41e5-7927-fe84-4c058015e469@redhat.com>
 <20200312114225.GB15619@zn.tnic>
 <899f366e-385d-bafa-9051-4e93dc9ba321@redhat.com>
 <20200312125032.GC15619@zn.tnic>
 <20200313044235.GA1159234@rani.riverdale.lan>
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On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 12:42:36AM -0400, Arvind Sankar wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 01:50:39PM +0100, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 12:58:24PM +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
> > > My version of this patch has already been tested this way. It is
> > 
> > Tested with kexec maybe but if the 0day bot keeps finding breakage, that
> > ain't good enough.
> > 
> > > 1. Things are already broken, my patch just exposes the brokenness
> > > of some configs, it is not actually breaking things (well it breaks
> > > the build, changing a silent brokenness into an obvious one).
> > 
> > As I already explained, that is not good enough.
> > 
> > > 2. I send out the first version of this patch on 7 October 2019, it
> > > has not seen any reaction until now. So I'm sending out new versions
> > > quickly now that this issue is finally getting some attention...
> > 
> > And that is never the right approach.
> > 
> > Maintainers are busy as hell so !urgent stuff gets to wait. Spamming
> > them with more patchsets does not help - fixing stuff properly does.
> > 
> > So, to sum up: if Arvind's approach is the better one, then we should do
> > that and s390 should be fixed this way too. And all tested. And we will
> > remove the hurry element from it all since it has not been noticed so
> > far so it is not urgent and we can take our time and fix it properly.
> > 
> > Ok?
> > 
> > Thx.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Regards/Gruss,
> >     Boris.
> > 
> > https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette
> 
> If I could try to summarize the situation here:
> - the purgatory requires filtering out certain CFLAGS/other settings set
>   for the generic kernel in order to work correctly
> - the patch proposed by Hans de Goede will detect missing filters at
>   build time rather than when kexec is executed
> - the filtering is currently not perfect as demonstrated by issues that
>   0day bot is finding -- but the patchset will find these problems at
>   build time rather than runtime
> - there might be a slight optimization as proposed by me [1] but it
>   might have problems as in [2] even if it seems to work
> 
> I think the patch as of v5 [0] is useful right now, to catch CFLAGS
> additions that aren't currently being filtered correctly. The real
> problem is that there exist CFLAGS that should be used for all source
> files in the kernel, and there are CFLAGS (eg tracing, stack check etc)
> that should only be used for the kernel proper. For special
> compilations, such as boot stubs, vdso's, purgatory we should have the
> generic CFLAGS but not the kernel-proper CFLAGS. The issue currently is
> that these special compilations need to filter out all the flags added
> for kernel-proper, and this is a moving target as more tracing/sanity
> flags get added.  Neither the solution of simply re-initializing CFLAGS
> (which will miss generic CFLAGS) nor trying to filter out CFLAGS (which
> will miss new kernel-proper CFLAGS) works very well. I think ideally
> splitting these into independent variables, i.e. BASE_FLAGS that can be
> used for everything, and KERNEL_FLAGS only to be used for the kernel
> proper is likely eventually the better solution, rather than conflating
> both into KBUILD_CFLAGS.
> 
> But to move forward incrementally, patch v5 is probably the cleanest. My
> suggestion in [1] I'm thinking is changing things significantly for
> kexec, by changing the purgatory from a relocatable object file into an
> actual executable, and might have knock-on implications that need to be
> reviewed and tested carefully before it can be merged, as shown by [2].
> 
> [0] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200312114951.56009-1-hdegoede@redhat.com/
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200312001006.GA170175@rani.riverdale.lan/
> [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200312182322.GA506594@rani.riverdale.lan/

Cc Nick Desaulniers, Nathan Chancellor, Ard Biesheuvel, who've all been
involved in these issue of trying to decide whether to filter out CFLAGS
or recreate them from scratch in various places.