The livepatch consistency model requires reliable stack tracing
architecture support in order to work properly. In order to achieve
this, two main issues have to be solved. First, reliable and consistent
call chain backtracing has to be ensured. Second, the unwinder needs to
be able to detect stack corruptions and return errors.
The "zSeries ELF Application Binary Interface Supplement" says:
"The stack pointer points to the first word of the lowest allocated
stack frame. If the "back chain" is implemented this word will point to
the previously allocated stack frame (towards higher addresses), except
for the first stack frame, which shall have a back chain of zero (NULL).
The stack shall grow downwards, in other words towards lower addresses."
"back chain" is optional. GCC option -mbackchain enables it. Quoting
Martin Schwidefsky [1]:
"The compiler is called with the -mbackchain option, all normal C
function will store the backchain in the function prologue. All
functions written in assembler code should do the same, if you find one
that does not we should fix that. The end result is that a task that
*voluntarily* called schedule() should have a proper backchain at all
times.
Dependent on the use case this may or may not be enough. Asynchronous
interrupts may stop the CPU at the beginning of a function, if kernel
preemption is enabled we can end up with a broken backchain. The
production kernels for IBM Z are all compiled *without* kernel
preemption. So yes, we might get away without the objtool support.
On a side-note, we do have a line item to implement the ORC unwinder for
the kernel, that includes the objtool support. Once we have that we can
drop the -mbackchain option for the kernel build. That gives us a nice
little performance benefit. I hope that the change from backchain to the
ORC unwinder will not be too hard to implement in the livepatch tools."
Since -mbackchain is enabled by default when the kernel is compiled, the
call chain backtracing should be currently ensured and objtool should
not be necessary for livepatch purposes.
Regarding the second issue, stack corruptions and non-reliable states
have to be recognized by the unwinder. Mainly it means to detect
preemption or page faults, the end of the task stack must be reached,
return addresses must be valid text addresses and hacks like function
graph tracing and kretprobes must be properly detected.
Unwinding a running task's stack is not a problem, because there is a
livepatch requirement that every checked task is blocked, except for the
current task. Due to that, the implementation can be much simpler
compared to the existing non-reliable infrastructure. We can consider a
task's kernel/thread stack only and skip the other stacks.
[1] 20180912121106.31ffa97c@mschwideX1 [not archived on lore.kernel.org]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20191106095601.29986-5-mbenes@suse.cz
Reviewed-by: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
Tested-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Vasily Gorbik <gor@linux.ibm.com>
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