On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 10:54:01AM -0800, Song Liu wrote:
> Josh reported a bug:
>
> When the object to be patched is a module, and that module is
> rmmod'ed and reloaded, it fails to load with:
>
> module: x86/modules: Skipping invalid relocation target, existing value is nonzero for type 2, loc 00000000ba0302e9, val ffffffffa03e293c
> livepatch: failed to initialize patch 'livepatch_nfsd' for module 'nfsd' (-8)
> livepatch: patch 'livepatch_nfsd' failed for module 'nfsd', refusing to load module 'nfsd'
>
> The livepatch module has a relocation which references a symbol
> in the _previous_ loading of nfsd. When apply_relocate_add()
> tries to replace the old relocation with a new one, it sees that
> the previous one is nonzero and it errors out.
>
> He also proposed three different solutions. We could remove the error
> check in apply_relocate_add() introduced by commit eda9cec4c9a1
> ("x86/module: Detect and skip invalid relocations"). However the check
> is useful for detecting corrupted modules.
>
> We could also deny the patched modules to be removed. If it proved to be
> a major drawback for users, we could still implement a different
> approach. The solution would also complicate the existing code a lot.
>
> We thus decided to reverse the relocation patching (clear all relocation
> targets on x86_64). The solution is not
> universal and is too much arch-specific, but it may prove to be simpler
> in the end.
>
> Reported-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Originally-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@xxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Song Liu <song@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Acked-by: Miroslav Benes <mbenes@xxxxxxx>
> Reviewed-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@xxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@xxxxxxxxxx>
--
Josh
