Re: [PATCH 1/1] x86: fix text_poke

From: Mathieu Desnoyers
Date: Fri Apr 25 2008 - 11:55:03 EST


* Linus Torvalds (torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >
> > something like the patch below? (untested)
>
> No. That whole code sequence is total and utter crap. It needs to be
> rewritten.
>
> It first does a BUG_ON() if it's not naturally aligned (because that
> wouldn't be atomic), and then it has code for page crossing! What a TOTAL
> PIECE OF SH*T!
>
> Hint:
> - if it's naturally aligned, it couldn't be page crossing ANYWAY
> - and if it was a page-crosser, it sure as hell couldn't be atomic!
>
> The code is just crap, crap, crap. It needs to be rewritten from scratch.
> I'll have a patch soonish.
>
> Linus


Woooow, just a sec here. I removed the atomicity test _because_ there
happen to be a case where it's safe to do non-atomic instruction
modification. If we do :

1) replace the instruction first byte by a breakpoint, execute an
instruction bypass (see the immediate values patches for detail)
2) modify the instruction non-atomically
3) put back the original instruction first byte.

That's why I removed the BUG_ONs at the beginning of the function.
That's also why it's required to deal with page crossing.

Mathieu


--
Mathieu Desnoyers
Computer Engineering Ph.D. Student, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68
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