linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] x86/kbuild: enable modversions for symbols exported from asm

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Message-ID: <20161209181459.1f0a4fed@roar.ozlabs.ibm.com>
Date:   Fri, 9 Dec 2016 18:14:59 +1000
From:   Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@...il.com>
To:     Stanislav Kozina <skozina@...hat.com>
Cc:     Don Zickus <dzickus@...hat.com>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Ben Hutchings <ben@...adent.org.uk>,
        Michal Marek <mmarek@...e.com>,
        Adam Borowski <kilobyte@...band.pl>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        Linux Kbuild mailing list <linux-kbuild@...r.kernel.org>,
        Debian kernel maintainers <debian-kernel@...ts.debian.org>,
        "linux-arch@...r.kernel.org" <linux-arch@...r.kernel.org>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] x86/kbuild: enable modversions for symbols exported
 from asm

On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 08:55:51 +0100
Stanislav Kozina <skozina@...hat.com> wrote:

> >> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?  
> > As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
> > debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
> > superior (not that I've tested them).  
> 
> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also 
> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I 
> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of 
> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on 
> module load.
> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just 
> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.

A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?

Thanks,
Nick