Re: [PATCH] uprobes: Ignore unsupported instructions in uprobe_mmap

From: Srikar Dronamraju
Date: Thu Aug 02 2012 - 12:55:05 EST


> > uprobe_mmap()->install_breakpoint() can fail if the probed insn is not
> > supported
>
> But there are other reasons why it can fail,
>
> > However failing mmap_region()/do_fork() because of a probe on an
> > unsupported instruction is wrong.
>
> Srikar, I strongly, absolutely disagree. Please correct me, but..
>
> Do you realize how much uprobes hooks in mmap_region/dup_mmap are broken?
>
> (cough, can't resist, vma_adjust()->uprobe_mmap() is not right too, but
> this is another story).
>
> OK, lets start with dup_mmap:
>
> // retval == 0
>
> if (file && uprobe_mmap(tmp))
> goto out;
>
> out:
> up_write(&mm->mmap_sem);
> flush_tlb_mm(oldmm);
> up_write(&oldmm->mmap_sem);
> return retval;
>
> Given that retval == 0, what do you think dup_mmap() returns if
> uprobe_mmap() fails? And note that we didn't copy all vmas.
> OK, at least this can't crash (afaics), and easy to fix.
>
>
> But mmap_region() is worse, much worse. It simply can _not_ fail
> after uprobe_mmap (of course, I am not saying this is unfixable)
> without the crash. And note that the crash is "delayed". And btw,
> like dup_mmap(), mmap_region() doesn't return the error too.

Oh, thats really a bad mistake from my side. I apologize.

>
> Srikar, I strongly believe this horror must not exist. Either
> we should teach mmap_region() and dup_mmap() (and vma_adjust!)
> to fail correctly, or we should ignore the error code.
>
> It is that simple, isn't it?
>

Right.

> Whatever you do with uprobe_mmap(), even if you change it to always
> return 0, the code in mmap_region() is absolutely, absolutely broken.
>

But uprobe_mmap() still needs to walk thro the probe list and
insert the other probes. Currently we just ignore the remaining probes
and that has to be fixed within uprobe_mmap.

> Do you agree?
>
> And once again. I agree, in the long term we should reconsider
> this change. But we need a simple fix for now/stable.
>

Agree.

> > Hence change uprobe_mmap() to ignore unsupported instructions.
>
> OK. Now suppose that mmap_region()-> uprobe_mmap() fails because
> the caller is SIGKILL'ed (so __get_user_pages fails). Given that
> mmap_region() can't handle the error correctly, the kernel can
> crash.
>

How about having your fix + my patch to fix the uprobe_mmap()?

--
Thanks and Regards
Srikar

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