Messages in this thread |  | | From | Jann Horn <> | Date | Mon, 6 Jan 2020 17:39:30 +0100 | Subject | BPF tracing trampoline synchronization between update/freeing and execution? |
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Hi!
I was chatting with kpsingh about BPF trampolines, and I noticed that it looks like BPF trampolines (as of current bpf-next/master) seem to be missing synchronization between trampoline code updates and trampoline execution. Or maybe I'm missing something?
If I understand correctly, trampolines are executed directly from the fentry placeholders at the start of arbitrary kernel functions, so they can run without any locks held. So for example, if task A starts executing a trampoline on entry to sys_open(), then gets preempted in the middle of the trampoline, and then task B quickly calls BPF_RAW_TRACEPOINT_OPEN twice, and then task A continues execution, task A will end up executing the middle of newly-written machine code, which can probably end up crashing the kernel somehow?
I think that at least to synchronize trampoline text freeing with concurrent trampoline execution, it is necessary to do something similar to what the livepatching code does with klp_check_stack(), and then either use a callback from the scheduler to periodically re-check tasks that were in the trampoline or let the trampoline tail-call into a cleanup helper that is part of normal kernel text. And you'd probably have to gate BPF trampolines on CONFIG_HAVE_RELIABLE_STACKTRACE.
[Trampoline *updates* could probably be handled more easily if a trampoline consisted of an immutable header that increments something like a percpu refcount followed by a mutable body, but given that that doesn't solve freeing trampolines, I'm not sure if it'd be worth the effort. Unless you just never free trampoline memory, but that's probably not a great idea.]
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