linux-kernel - Re: x86/paravirt: Detect over-sized patching bugs in paravirt_patch

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Date:   Thu, 25 Apr 2019 13:30:46 +0200
From:   Juergen Gross <jgross@...e.com>
To:     Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
Cc:     Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, x86@...nel.org,
        Andi Kleen <ak@...ux.intel.com>
Subject: Re: x86/paravirt: Detect over-sized patching bugs in
 paravirt_patch_call()

On 25/04/2019 12:57, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> * Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 11:50:39AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>>>
>>> * Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 11:17:17AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>>>>> It basically means that we silently won't do any patching and the kernel 
>>>>> will crash later on in mysterious ways, because paravirt patching is 
>>>>> usually relied on.
>>>>
>>>> That's OK. The compiler emits an indirect CALL/JMP to the pv_ops
>>>> structure contents. That _should_ stay valid and function correctly at
>>>> all times.
>>>
>>> It might result in a correctly executing kernel in terms of code 
>>> generation, but it doesn't result in a viable kernel: some of the places 
>>> rely on the patching going through and don't know what to do when it 
>>> doesn't and misbehave or crash in interesting ways.
>>>
>>> Guess how I know this. ;-)
>>
>> What sites would that be? It really should work AFAIK.
> 
> So for example I tried to increasing the size of one of the struct 
> patch_xxl members:
> 
> --- a/arch/x86/kernel/paravirt_patch.c
> +++ b/arch/x86/kernel/paravirt_patch.c
> @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ struct patch_xxl {
>  	const unsigned char	irq_restore_fl[2];
>  # ifdef CONFIG_X86_64
>  	const unsigned char	cpu_wbinvd[2];
> -	const unsigned char	cpu_usergs_sysret64[6];
> +	const unsigned char	cpu_usergs_sysret64[60];
>  	const unsigned char	cpu_swapgs[3];
>  	const unsigned char	mov64[3];
>  # else
> 
> Which with the vanilla kernel crashes on boot much, much later:
> 
> [    2.478026] PANIC: double fault, error_code: 0x0

Sure, there is no NOP padding applied. Pre-populating the area with
1 byte NOPs would avoid the crash.

> But in any case, even if many of the others will work if the patching 
> fails silently, is there any case where we'd treat patching failure as an 
> acceptable case?
> 
> BUG_ON() in paravirt kernels is an easily debuggable condition and beats 
> the above kinds of symptoms. But I can turn it into a WARN_ON_ONCE() if 
> you think that's better?

I'd prefer the BUG_ON(). Its not as if those conditions will occur on
very few machines only. In case some patching isn't working we should
catch those issues early.


Juergen