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Pull live patching infrastructure from Jiri Kosina:
"Let me provide a bit of history first, before describing what is in
this pile.
Originally, there was kSplice as a standalone project that implemented
stop_machine()-based patching for the linux kernel. This project got
later acquired, and the current owner is providing live patching as a
proprietary service, without any intentions to have their
implementation merged.
Then, due to rising user/customer demand, both Red Hat and SUSE
started working on their own implementation (not knowing about each
other), and announced first versions roughly at the same time [1] [2].
The principle difference between the two solutions is how they are
making sure that the patching is performed in a consistent way when it
comes to different execution threads with respect to the semantic
nature of the change that is being introduced.
In a nutshell, kPatch is issuing stop_machine(), then looking at
stacks of all existing processess, and if it decides that the system
is in a state that can be patched safely, it proceeds insterting code
redirection machinery to the patched functions.
On the other hand, kGraft provides a per-thread consistency during one
single pass of a process through the kernel and performs a lazy
contignuous migration of threads from "unpatched" universe to the
"patched" one at safe checkpoints.
If interested in a more detailed discussion about the consistency
models and its possible combinations, please see the thread that
evolved around [3].
It pretty quickly became obvious to the interested parties that it's
absolutely impractical in this case to have several isolated solutions
for one task to co-exist in the kernel. During a dedicated Live
Kernel Patching track at LPC in Dusseldorf, all the interested parties
sat together and came up with a joint aproach that would work for both
distro vendors. Steven Rostedt took notes [4] from this meeting.
And the foundation for that aproach is what's present in this pull
request.
It provides a basic infrastructure for function "live patching" (i.e.
code redirection), including API for kernel modules containing the
actual patches, and API/ABI for userspace to be able to operate on the
patches (look up what patches are applied, enable/disable them, etc).
It's relatively simple and minimalistic, as it's making use of
existing kernel infrastructure (namely ftrace) as much as possible.
It's also self-contained, in a sense that it doesn't hook itself in
any other kernel subsystem (it doesn't even touch any other code).
It's now implemented for x86 only as a reference architecture, but
support for powerpc, s390 and arm is already in the works (adding
arch-specific support basically boils down to teaching ftrace about
regs-saving).
Once this common infrastructure gets merged, both Red Hat and SUSE
have agreed to immediately start porting their current solutions on
top of this, abandoning their out-of-tree code. The plan basically is
that each patch will be marked by flag(s) that would indicate which
consistency model it is willing to use (again, the details have been
sketched out already in the thread at [3]).
Before this happens, the current codebase can be used to patch a large
group of secruity/stability problems the patches for which are not too
complex (in a sense that they don't introduce non-trivial change of
function's return value semantics, they don't change layout of data
structures, etc) -- this corresponds to LEAVE_FUNCTION &&
SWITCH_FUNCTION semantics described at [3].
This tree has been in linux-next since December.
[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/4/30/477
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/7/14/857
[3] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/11/7/354
[4] http://linuxplumbersconf.org/2014/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/LPC2014_LivePatching.txt
[ The core code is introduced by the three commits authored by Seth
Jennings, which got a lot of changes incorporated during numerous
respins and reviews of the initial implementation. All the followup
commits have materialized only after public tree has been created,
so they were not folded into initial three commits so that the
public tree doesn't get rebased ]"
* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/livepatching:
livepatch: add missing newline to error message
livepatch: rename config to CONFIG_LIVEPATCH
livepatch: fix uninitialized return value
livepatch: support for repatching a function
livepatch: enforce patch stacking semantics
livepatch: change ARCH_HAVE_LIVE_PATCHING to HAVE_LIVE_PATCHING
livepatch: fix deferred module patching order
livepatch: handle ancient compilers with more grace
livepatch: kconfig: use bool instead of boolean
livepatch: samples: fix usage example comments
livepatch: MAINTAINERS: add git tree location
livepatch: use FTRACE_OPS_FL_IPMODIFY
livepatch: move x86 specific ftrace handler code to arch/x86
livepatch: samples: add sample live patching module
livepatch: kernel: add support for live patching
livepatch: kernel: add TAINT_LIVEPATCH
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