PaX/GrSecurity patched kernels implement a dialect of C that relies on a
GCC plugin for enforcement. A basic idea in this dialect is that
function pointers in structures should not change during runtime.
This causes code that modifies function pointers at runtime to fail to
compile in many instances. The autotools checks rely on whether or
not small test cases compile against a given kernel. Some
autotools checks assume some default case if other cases fail. When one
of these autotools checks tests a PaX/GrSecurity patched kernel by
modifying a function pointer at runtime, the default case will be used.
Early detection of such situations is possible by relying on compiler
warnings, which are compiler errors when --enable-debug is used.
Unfortunately, very few people build ZFS with --enable-debug. The more
common situation is that these issues manifest themselves as runtime
failures in the form of NULL pointer exceptions.
Previous patches that addressed such issues with PaX/GrSecurity
compatibility largely relied on rewriting autotools checks to avoid
runtime function pointer modification or the addition of PaX/GrSecurity
specific checks. This patch takes the previous work to its logical
conclusion by eliminating the use of runtime function pointer
modification. This permits the removal of PaX-specific autotools checks
in favor of ones that work across all supported kernels.
This should resolve issues that were reported to occur with
PaX/GrSecurity-patched Linux 3.7.5 kernels on Gentoo Linux.
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457176
We should be able to prevent future regressions in PaX/GrSecurity
compatibility by ensuring that all changes to ZFSOnLinux avoid runtime
function pointer modification. At the same time, this does not solve the
issue of silent failures triggering default cases in the autotools
check, which is what permitted these regressions to become runtime
failures in the first place. This will need to be addressed in a future
patch.
Reported-by: Marcin Mirosław <bug@mejor.pl>
Signed-off-by: Richard Yao <ryao@cs.stonybrook.edu>
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#1300
c38367c73f