3 Commits

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
Petr Mladek	842c088464	livepatch: Fix stacking of patches with respect to RCU ... rcu_read_(un)lock(), list_*_rcu(), and synchronize_rcu() are used for a secure access and manipulation of the list of patches that modify the same function. In particular, it is the variable func_stack that is accessible from the ftrace handler via struct ftrace_ops and klp_ops. Of course, it synchronizes also some states of the patch on the top of the stack, e.g. func->transition in klp_ftrace_handler. At the same time, this mechanism guards also the manipulation of task->patch_state. It is modified according to the state of the transition and the state of the process. Now, all this works well as long as RCU works well. Sadly livepatching might get into some corner cases when this is not true. For example, RCU is not watching when rcu_read_lock() is taken in idle threads. It is because they might sleep and prevent reaching the grace period for too long. There are ways how to make RCU watching even in idle threads, see rcu_irq_enter(). But there is a small location inside RCU infrastructure when even this does not work. This small problematic location can be detected either before calling rcu_irq_enter() by rcu_irq_enter_disabled() or later by rcu_is_watching(). Sadly, there is no safe way how to handle it. Once we detect that RCU was not watching, we might see inconsistent state of the function stack and the related variables in klp_ftrace_handler(). Then we could do a wrong decision, use an incompatible implementation of the function and break the consistency of the system. We could warn but we could not avoid the damage. Fortunately, ftrace has similar problems and they seem to be solved well there. It uses a heavy weight implementation of some RCU operations. In particular, it replaces: + rcu_read_lock() with preempt_disable_notrace() + rcu_read_unlock() with preempt_enable_notrace() + synchronize_rcu() with schedule_on_each_cpu(sync_work) My understanding is that this is RCU implementation from a stone age. It meets the core RCU requirements but it is rather ineffective. Especially, it does not allow to batch or speed up the synchronize calls. On the other hand, it is very trivial. It allows to safely trace and/or livepatch even the RCU core infrastructure. And the effectiveness is a not a big issue because using ftrace or livepatches on productive systems is a rare operation. The safety is much more important than a negligible extra load. Note that the alternative implementation follows the RCU principles. Therefore, we could and actually must use list_*_rcu() variants when manipulating the func_stack. These functions allow to access the pointers in the right order and with the right barriers. But they do not use any other information that would be set only by rcu_read_lock(). Also note that there are actually two problems solved in ftrace: First, it cares about the consistency of RCU read sections. It is being solved the way as described and used in this patch. Second, ftrace needs to make sure that nobody is inside the dynamic trampoline when it is being freed. For this, it also calls synchronize_rcu_tasks() in preemptive kernel in ftrace_shutdown(). Livepatch has similar problem but it is solved by ftrace for free. klp_ftrace_handler() is a good guy and never sleeps. In addition, it is registered with FTRACE_OPS_FL_DYNAMIC. It causes that unregister_ftrace_function() calls: * schedule_on_each_cpu(ftrace_sync) - always * synchronize_rcu_tasks() - in preemptive kernel The effect is that nobody is neither inside the dynamic trampoline nor inside the ftrace handler after unregister_ftrace_function() returns. [jkosina@suse.cz: reformat changelog, fix comment] Signed-off-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com> Acked-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com> Acked-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>	2017-06-20 10:42:19 +02:00
Josh Poimboeuf	d83a7cb375	livepatch: change to a per-task consistency model ... Change livepatch to use a basic per-task consistency model. This is the foundation which will eventually enable us to patch those ~10% of security patches which change function or data semantics. This is the biggest remaining piece needed to make livepatch more generally useful. This code stems from the design proposal made by Vojtech [1] in November 2014. It's a hybrid of kGraft and kpatch: it uses kGraft's per-task consistency and syscall barrier switching combined with kpatch's stack trace switching. There are also a number of fallback options which make it quite flexible. Patches are applied on a per-task basis, when the task is deemed safe to switch over. When a patch is enabled, livepatch enters into a transition state where tasks are converging to the patched state. Usually this transition state can complete in a few seconds. The same sequence occurs when a patch is disabled, except the tasks converge from the patched state to the unpatched state. An interrupt handler inherits the patched state of the task it interrupts. The same is true for forked tasks: the child inherits the patched state of the parent. Livepatch uses several complementary approaches to determine when it's safe to patch tasks: 1. The first and most effective approach is stack checking of sleeping tasks. If no affected functions are on the stack of a given task, the task is patched. In most cases this will patch most or all of the tasks on the first try. Otherwise it'll keep trying periodically. This option is only available if the architecture has reliable stacks (HAVE_RELIABLE_STACKTRACE). 2. The second approach, if needed, is kernel exit switching. A task is switched when it returns to user space from a system call, a user space IRQ, or a signal. It's useful in the following cases: a) Patching I/O-bound user tasks which are sleeping on an affected function. In this case you have to send SIGSTOP and SIGCONT to force it to exit the kernel and be patched. b) Patching CPU-bound user tasks. If the task is highly CPU-bound then it will get patched the next time it gets interrupted by an IRQ. c) In the future it could be useful for applying patches for architectures which don't yet have HAVE_RELIABLE_STACKTRACE. In this case you would have to signal most of the tasks on the system. However this isn't supported yet because there's currently no way to patch kthreads without HAVE_RELIABLE_STACKTRACE. 3. For idle "swapper" tasks, since they don't ever exit the kernel, they instead have a klp_update_patch_state() call in the idle loop which allows them to be patched before the CPU enters the idle state. (Note there's not yet such an approach for kthreads.) All the above approaches may be skipped by setting the 'immediate' flag in the 'klp_patch' struct, which will disable per-task consistency and patch all tasks immediately. This can be useful if the patch doesn't change any function or data semantics. Note that, even with this flag set, it's possible that some tasks may still be running with an old version of the function, until that function returns. There's also an 'immediate' flag in the 'klp_func' struct which allows you to specify that certain functions in the patch can be applied without per-task consistency. This might be useful if you want to patch a common function like schedule(), and the function change doesn't need consistency but the rest of the patch does. For architectures which don't have HAVE_RELIABLE_STACKTRACE, the user must set patch->immediate which causes all tasks to be patched immediately. This option should be used with care, only when the patch doesn't change any function or data semantics. In the future, architectures which don't have HAVE_RELIABLE_STACKTRACE may be allowed to use per-task consistency if we can come up with another way to patch kthreads. The /sys/kernel/livepatch/<patch>/transition file shows whether a patch is in transition. Only a single patch (the topmost patch on the stack) can be in transition at a given time. A patch can remain in transition indefinitely, if any of the tasks are stuck in the initial patch state. A transition can be reversed and effectively canceled by writing the opposite value to the /sys/kernel/livepatch/<patch>/enabled file while the transition is in progress. Then all the tasks will attempt to converge back to the original patch state. [1] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20141107140458.GA21774@suse.cz Signed-off-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com> Acked-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz> Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> # for the scheduler changes Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>	2017-03-08 09:36:21 +01:00
Josh Poimboeuf	c349cdcaba	livepatch: move patching functions into patch.c ... Move functions related to the actual patching of functions and objects into a new patch.c file. Signed-off-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com> Acked-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz> Reviewed-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com> Reviewed-by: Kamalesh Babulal <kamalesh@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>	2017-03-08 09:23:40 +01:00