[ This is the non-RFC version.
It went through and passed all my tests. If there's no objections I'm going to include this in my pull request. I still have patches in my INBOX that may still be included, so I need to run those through my tests as well, so a pull request wont be immediate. ]
Nicolai Stange discovered that Live Kernel Patching can have unforseen consequences if tracing is enabled when there are functions that are patched. The reason being, is that Live Kernel patching is built on top of ftrace, which will have the patched functions call the live kernel trampoline directly, and that trampoline will modify the regs->ip address to return to the patched function.
But in the transition between changing the call to the customized trampoline, the tracing code is needed to have its handler called an well, so the function fentry location must be changed from calling the live kernel patching trampoline, to the ftrace_reg_caller trampoline which will iterate through all the registered ftrace handlers for that function.
During this transition, a break point is added to do the live code modifications. But if that break point is hit, it just skips calling any handler, and makes the call site act as a nop. For tracing, the worse that can happen is that you miss a function being traced, but for live kernel patching the affects are more severe, as the old buggy function is now called.
To solve this, an int3_emulate_call() is created for x86_64 to allow ftrace on x86_64 to emulate the call to ftrace_regs_caller() which will make sure all the registered handlers to that function are still called. And this keeps live kernel patching happy!
To mimimize the changes, and to avoid controversial patches, this only changes x86_64. Due to the way x86_32 implements the regs->sp the complexity of emulating calls on that platform is too much for stable patches, and live kernel patching does not support x86_32 anyway.
Josh Poimboeuf (1): x86_64: Add gap to int3 to allow for call emulation
Peter Zijlstra (2): x86_64: Allow breakpoints to emulate call instructions ftrace/x86_64: Emulate call function while updating in breakpoint handler
---- arch/x86/entry/entry_64.S | 18 ++++++++++++++++-- arch/x86/include/asm/text-patching.h | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ arch/x86/kernel/ftrace.c | 32 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++----- 3 files changed, 71 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)