On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 10:47:13PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 05:20:33PM -0400, Kent Overstreet wrote: > > On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 02:02:11PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote: > > > For something that small, why not use the text_poke API? > > > > This looks like it's meant for patching existing kernel text, which > > isn't what I want - I'm generating new functions on the fly, one per > > btree node. > > > > I'm working up a new allocator - a (very simple) slab allocator where > > you pass a buffer, and it gives you a copy of that buffer mapped > > executable, but not writeable. > > > > It looks like we'll be able to convert bpf, kprobes, and ftrace > > trampolines to it; it'll consolidate a fair amount of code (particularly > > in bpf), and they won't have to burn a full page per allocation anymore. > > > > bpf has a neat trick where it maps the same page in two different > > locations, one is the executable location and the other is the writeable > > location - I'm stealing that. > > How does that avoid the problem of being able to construct an arbitrary > gadget that somebody else will then execute? IOW, what bpf has done > seems like it's working around & undoing the security improvements. > > I suppose it's an improvement that only the executable address is > passed back to the caller, and not the writable address. That's my thinking; grepping around finds several uses of module_alloc() that are all doing different variations on the page permissions dance. Let's just do it once and do it right...