diff mbox

x86/kbuild: enable modversions for symbols exported from asm

Message ID 20161201051852.28dc335f@roar.ozlabs.ibm.com (mailing list archive)
State New, archived
Headers show

Commit Message

Nicholas Piggin Nov. 30, 2016, 6:18 p.m. UTC
On Tue, 29 Nov 2016 12:35:57 -0800
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 11:57 AM, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> > If the modversion is missing then the fallback should be to a full
> > vermagic match, i.e. including the release string.  Something like
> > this (untested):  
> 
> This really seems way too complicated for this situation.
> 
> And it's wrong too. The whole point of modversions was that you didn't
> want to do the full version check.
> 
> We already know there were *some* crc's (we checked that at the top of
> check_version(), but we've also checked it in "same_magic()" - it's
> what makes us ignore the exact version number), but this particular
> symbol doesn't have a crc. Just let it through, because we have bugs
> in binutils.
> 
> So your extra complexity logic seems actively wrong. It makes
> MODVERSIONS not work at all, rather than limp along. You're better off
> just not having MODVERSIONS.

Here's an initial rough hack at removing modversions. It gives an idea
of the complexity we're carrying for this feature (keeping in mind most
of the lines removed are generated parser).

Note I removed the `rm -r scripts/genksyms` hunks to reduce mail size.

In its place I just added a simple config option to override vermagic
so distros can manage it entirely themselves.

Thanks,
Nick

---
 .gitignore                               |    1 -
 Documentation/dontdiff                   |    2 -
 Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt         |    4 -
 Makefile                                 |    7 -
 arch/arm64/include/asm/module.h          |    4 -
 arch/avr32/boot/images/Makefile          |    2 -
 arch/powerpc/include/asm/module.h        |    4 -
 arch/powerpc/kernel/module_64.c          |   24 +-
 arch/x86/tools/relocs.c                  |    1 -
 drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_ssif.c            |    5 -
 drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile    |    4 +-
 drivers/message/fusion/mptlan.h          |    3 -
 include/asm-generic/export.h             |    8 -
 include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h        |   35 -
 include/linux/export.h                   |   17 +-
 include/linux/module.h                   |   12 -
 include/linux/vermagic.h                 |   12 +-
 init/Kconfig                             |   28 +-
 kernel/module.c                          |  213 +--
 scripts/Makefile                         |    1 -
 scripts/Makefile.build                   |  113 --
 scripts/Makefile.lib                     |    3 +-
 scripts/Makefile.modpost                 |    2 +-
 scripts/adjust_autoksyms.sh              |    5 -
 scripts/export_report.pl                 |   30 +-
 scripts/genksyms/.gitignore              |    5 -
 scripts/genksyms/Makefile                |   14 -
 scripts/genksyms/genksyms.c              |  880 -----------
 scripts/genksyms/genksyms.h              |   94 --
 scripts/genksyms/keywords.gperf          |   60 -
 scripts/genksyms/keywords.hash.c_shipped |  229 ---
 scripts/genksyms/lex.l                   |  481 ------
 scripts/genksyms/lex.lex.c_shipped       | 2291 ----------------------------
 scripts/genksyms/parse.tab.c_shipped     | 2396 ------------------------------
 scripts/genksyms/parse.tab.h_shipped     |  118 --
 scripts/genksyms/parse.y                 |  513 -------
 scripts/mksysmap                         |    6 +-
 scripts/mod/modpost.c                    |  122 +-
 scripts/module-common.lds                |    5 -
 scripts/namespace.pl                     |    2 -
 40 files changed, 60 insertions(+), 7696 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/.gitignore
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/Makefile
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/genksyms.c
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/genksyms.h
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/keywords.gperf
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/keywords.hash.c_shipped
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/lex.l
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/lex.lex.c_shipped
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/parse.tab.c_shipped
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/parse.tab.h_shipped
 delete mode 100644 scripts/genksyms/parse.y

Comments

Linus Torvalds Nov. 30, 2016, 6:40 p.m. UTC | #1
On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Here's an initial rough hack at removing modversions. It gives an idea
> of the complexity we're carrying for this feature (keeping in mind most
> of the lines removed are generated parser).

You definitely don't have to try to convince me. We've had many issues
with modversions over the years. This was just the "last drop" as far
as I'm concerned, we've had random odd crc generation failures due to
some build races too.

> In its place I just added a simple config option to override vermagic
> so distros can manage it entirely themselves.

So at least Fedora doesn't even enable CONFIG_MODVERSIONS as-is. I'm
_hoping_ it's just Debian that wants this, and we'd need to get some
input from the Debian people whether that "control vermagic" is
sufficient? I suspect it isn't, but I can't come up with any simple
alternate model either..

I'm also somewhat surprised that it's Debian that has this problem,
considering how Debian is usually the distro that is _least_ receptive
to various non-free binaries.

            Linus
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Ben Hutchings Nov. 30, 2016, 9:33 p.m. UTC | #2
On Wed, 2016-11-30 at 10:40 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Here's an initial rough hack at removing modversions. It gives an idea
> > of the complexity we're carrying for this feature (keeping in mind most
> > of the lines removed are generated parser).
> 
> You definitely don't have to try to convince me. We've had many issues
> with modversions over the years. This was just the "last drop" as far
> as I'm concerned, we've had random odd crc generation failures due to
> some build races too.
> 
> > In its place I just added a simple config option to override vermagic
> > so distros can manage it entirely themselves.
> 
> So at least Fedora doesn't even enable CONFIG_MODVERSIONS as-is. I'm
> _hoping_ it's just Debian that wants this,

The last time I looked, RHEL and SLE did.  They change the release
string for each new kernel version, but they will copy/link old out-of-
tree modules into the new version's "weak-updates" module subdirectory
if the symbol versions still match.

> and we'd need to get some
> input from the Debian people whether that "control vermagic" is
> sufficient? I suspect it isn't, but I can't come up with any simple
> alternate model either..

Allowing the vermagic to be changed separately doesn't help us, as we
already control the release string.  If we were to change some of the
module tools to consider vermagic then it would allow us to report the
full version in the release string while not forcing rebuilds on every
kernel upgrade - but that's not a pressing problem.

One thing that could work for us would be:

- Stricter version matching for in-tree modules (maybe some extra
  part in vermagic that is skipped for out-of-tree modules)
- Ability to blacklist use of a symbol, or all symbols in a module,
  by out-of-tree modules

where the blacklist would be a matter of distribution policy.  But this
would still require a fair amount of work by someone, and I doubt you'd
want this upstream.

> I'm also somewhat surprised that it's Debian that has this problem,
> considering how Debian is usually the distro that is _least_ receptive
> to various non-free binaries.

If this was just about non-free modules I wouldn't care.  There are
also many freely licenced out-of-tree modules that for various reasons
don't get submitted or accepted upstream; also backports of new or
updated drivers.

Ben.
Nicholas Piggin Dec. 1, 2016, 1:55 a.m. UTC | #3
On Wed, 30 Nov 2016 21:33:01 +0000
Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:

> On Wed, 2016-11-30 at 10:40 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > Here's an initial rough hack at removing modversions. It gives an idea
> > > of the complexity we're carrying for this feature (keeping in mind most
> > > of the lines removed are generated parser).  
> > 
> > You definitely don't have to try to convince me. We've had many issues
> > with modversions over the years. This was just the "last drop" as far
> > as I'm concerned, we've had random odd crc generation failures due to
> > some build races too.
> >   
> > > In its place I just added a simple config option to override vermagic
> > > so distros can manage it entirely themselves.  
> > 
> > So at least Fedora doesn't even enable CONFIG_MODVERSIONS as-is. I'm
> > _hoping_ it's just Debian that wants this,  
> 
> The last time I looked, RHEL and SLE did.  They change the release
> string for each new kernel version, but they will copy/link old out-of-
> tree modules into the new version's "weak-updates" module subdirectory
> if the symbol versions still match.
> 
> > and we'd need to get some
> > input from the Debian people whether that "control vermagic" is
> > sufficient? I suspect it isn't, but I can't come up with any simple
> > alternate model either..  
> 
> Allowing the vermagic to be changed separately doesn't help us, as we
> already control the release string.  If we were to change some of the
> module tools to consider vermagic then it would allow us to report the
> full version in the release string while not forcing rebuilds on every
> kernel upgrade - but that's not a pressing problem.

Okay, but existing modversions AFAIKS does not solve your problems described
in yor your earlier mail either. Modversions hardly catches ABI breakage at
all, you can't rely on it that way. It's far more likely that some structure
size changes deep in the kernel than an exported function type signature
changes.

I'm not sure how you know which exports are used only by in-tree modules
and which are used out of tree, but if you know that then you can version
them manually as we said by adding _v2 in the rare case you need to change
a behaviour.

So I'm still having trouble understanding what modversions is giving you.

> One thing that could work for us would be:
> 
> - Stricter version matching for in-tree modules (maybe some extra
>   part in vermagic that is skipped for out-of-tree modules)
> - Ability to blacklist use of a symbol, or all symbols in a module,
>   by out-of-tree modules
> 
> where the blacklist would be a matter of distribution policy.  But this
> would still require a fair amount of work by someone, and I doubt you'd
> want this upstream.

I don't think people are adverse to carrying some upstream complexity for
ditsros. Although for this fancy blacklist case, can it just be done in
userspace?

Thanks,
Nick
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Ben Hutchings Dec. 1, 2016, 2:35 a.m. UTC | #4
On Thu, 2016-12-01 at 12:55 +1100, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Nov 2016 21:33:01 +0000
> > Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2016-11-30 at 10:40 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > Here's an initial rough hack at removing modversions. It gives an idea
> > > > of the complexity we're carrying for this feature (keeping in mind most
> > > > of the lines removed are generated parser).  
> > > 
> > > You definitely don't have to try to convince me. We've had many issues
> > > with modversions over the years. This was just the "last drop" as far
> > > as I'm concerned, we've had random odd crc generation failures due to
> > > some build races too.
> > >   
> > > > In its place I just added a simple config option to override vermagic
> > > > so distros can manage it entirely themselves.  
> > > 
> > > So at least Fedora doesn't even enable CONFIG_MODVERSIONS as-is. I'm
> > > _hoping_ it's just Debian that wants this,  
> > 
> > The last time I looked, RHEL and SLE did.  They change the release
> > string for each new kernel version, but they will copy/link old out-of-
> > tree modules into the new version's "weak-updates" module subdirectory
> > if the symbol versions still match.
> > 
> > > and we'd need to get some
> > > input from the Debian people whether that "control vermagic" is
> > > sufficient? I suspect it isn't, but I can't come up with any simple
> > > alternate model either..  
> > 
> > Allowing the vermagic to be changed separately doesn't help us, as we
> > already control the release string.  If we were to change some of the
> > module tools to consider vermagic then it would allow us to report the
> > full version in the release string while not forcing rebuilds on every
> > kernel upgrade - but that's not a pressing problem.
> 
> Okay, but existing modversions AFAIKS does not solve your problems described
> in yor your earlier mail either. Modversions hardly catches ABI breakage at
> all, you can't rely on it that way. It's far more likely that some structure
> size changes deep in the kernel than an exported function type signature
> changes.

As I understand it, genksyms incorporates the definitions of a
function's parameter and return types - not just their names - and all
the types they refer to, recursively.  So a structure size change
should change the version of all functions where the function and its
caller pass that structure between them, however indirectly.  It finds
such indirect ABI breakage for me fairly regularly, though of course I
don't know that it finds everything.

> I'm not sure how you know which exports are used only by in-tree modules
> and which are used out of tree, but if you know that then you can version
> them manually as we said by adding _v2 in the rare case you need to change
> a behaviour.

That's fine for individual functions.

> So I'm still having trouble understanding what modversions is giving you.

Where there is a family of driver modules (e.g. foo-core, foo-pci, foo-
usb), a structure change can change all exports from foo-core.  That
ABI is of no use to out-of-tree drivers so we don't care about keeping
it stable, but we do care about preventing an accidental mismatch.

> > One thing that could work for us would be:
> > 
> > - Stricter version matching for in-tree modules (maybe some extra
> >   part in vermagic that is skipped for out-of-tree modules)
> > - Ability to blacklist use of a symbol, or all symbols in a module,
> >   by out-of-tree modules
> > 
> > where the blacklist would be a matter of distribution policy.  But this
> > would still require a fair amount of work by someone, and I doubt you'd
> > want this upstream.
> 
> I don't think people are adverse to carrying some upstream complexity for
> ditsros. Although for this fancy blacklist case, can it just be done in
> userspace?

Since the kernel does the symbol lookup and version matching, I'm not
sure what userland can do about it.

Ben.
Nicholas Piggin Dec. 1, 2016, 3:39 a.m. UTC | #5
On Thu, 01 Dec 2016 02:35:54 +0000
Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:

> On Thu, 2016-12-01 at 12:55 +1100, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > On Wed, 30 Nov 2016 21:33:01 +0000  
> > > Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:  
> >   
> > > On Wed, 2016-11-30 at 10:40 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:  
> > > > > On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > > 
> > > > > Here's an initial rough hack at removing modversions. It gives an idea
> > > > > of the complexity we're carrying for this feature (keeping in mind most
> > > > > of the lines removed are generated parser).    
> > > > 
> > > > You definitely don't have to try to convince me. We've had many issues
> > > > with modversions over the years. This was just the "last drop" as far
> > > > as I'm concerned, we've had random odd crc generation failures due to
> > > > some build races too.
> > > >     
> > > > > In its place I just added a simple config option to override vermagic
> > > > > so distros can manage it entirely themselves.    
> > > > 
> > > > So at least Fedora doesn't even enable CONFIG_MODVERSIONS as-is. I'm
> > > > _hoping_ it's just Debian that wants this,    
> > > 
> > > The last time I looked, RHEL and SLE did.  They change the release
> > > string for each new kernel version, but they will copy/link old out-of-
> > > tree modules into the new version's "weak-updates" module subdirectory
> > > if the symbol versions still match.
> > >   
> > > > and we'd need to get some
> > > > input from the Debian people whether that "control vermagic" is
> > > > sufficient? I suspect it isn't, but I can't come up with any simple
> > > > alternate model either..    
> > > 
> > > Allowing the vermagic to be changed separately doesn't help us, as we
> > > already control the release string.  If we were to change some of the
> > > module tools to consider vermagic then it would allow us to report the
> > > full version in the release string while not forcing rebuilds on every
> > > kernel upgrade - but that's not a pressing problem.  
> > 
> > Okay, but existing modversions AFAIKS does not solve your problems described
> > in yor your earlier mail either. Modversions hardly catches ABI breakage at
> > all, you can't rely on it that way. It's far more likely that some structure
> > size changes deep in the kernel than an exported function type signature
> > changes.  
> 
> As I understand it, genksyms incorporates the definitions of a
> function's parameter and return types - not just their names - and all
> the types they refer to, recursively.  So a structure size change
> should change the version of all functions where the function and its
> caller pass that structure between them, however indirectly.  It finds
> such indirect ABI breakage for me fairly regularly, though of course I
> don't know that it finds everything.

It is only the type name.

Not only that but even if you did extend it further to structure type
arrangement then you still have to deal with other structures followed
via pointers. Or (rarer but not unheard of):

- changes to structures without changes of the types of their members
- changes to arguments without changes of their type
- changes to semantics of functions
- data structures derived in ways other than exported symbols, e.g.,
  fixed register for `current` on some archs

This is actually a big problem with it, that it provides a false sense
of security. It simply can't be used to verify your ABI stability.

 [Aside: something like the tool Greg linked earlier,

 https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2016/talks/would-an-abi-changes-visualization-tool-be-useful-to-linux-kernel-maintenance/

 Would be great if that worked with the kernel. Not necessarily as part
 of the build system, but at least a tool that distros could use to
 analyze ABI changes. It wouldn't catch everything, but it would be far
 better than modversions.]

> > I'm not sure how you know which exports are used only by in-tree modules
> > and which are used out of tree, but if you know that then you can version
> > them manually as we said by adding _v2 in the rare case you need to change
> > a behaviour.  
> 
> That's fine for individual functions.
> 
> > So I'm still having trouble understanding what modversions is giving you.  
> 
> Where there is a family of driver modules (e.g. foo-core, foo-pci, foo-
> usb), a structure change can change all exports from foo-core.  That
> ABI is of no use to out-of-tree drivers so we don't care about keeping
> it stable, but we do care about preventing an accidental mismatch.

I still don't think modversions helps there. And how much burden is it
to change the export function names occasionally? I thought it was *very*
rare that an ABI change was required in distros.

> 
> > > One thing that could work for us would be:
> > > 
> > > - Stricter version matching for in-tree modules (maybe some extra
> > >   part in vermagic that is skipped for out-of-tree modules)
> > > - Ability to blacklist use of a symbol, or all symbols in a module,
> > >   by out-of-tree modules
> > > 
> > > where the blacklist would be a matter of distribution policy.  But this
> > > would still require a fair amount of work by someone, and I doubt you'd
> > > want this upstream.  
> > 
> > I don't think people are adverse to carrying some upstream complexity for
> > ditsros. Although for this fancy blacklist case, can it just be done in
> > userspace?  
> 
> Since the kernel does the symbol lookup and version matching, I'm not
> sure what userland can do about it.

I just didn't realize what you wanted the blacklist for. It sounded like
you wanted to be able to just wholesale prevent a module's symbols from
being exported.

Thanks,
Nick
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Don Zickus Dec. 1, 2016, 4:13 a.m. UTC | #6
On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 10:40:02AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Here's an initial rough hack at removing modversions. It gives an idea
> > of the complexity we're carrying for this feature (keeping in mind most
> > of the lines removed are generated parser).
> 
> You definitely don't have to try to convince me. We've had many issues
> with modversions over the years. This was just the "last drop" as far
> as I'm concerned, we've had random odd crc generation failures due to
> some build races too.
> 
> > In its place I just added a simple config option to override vermagic
> > so distros can manage it entirely themselves.
> 
> So at least Fedora doesn't even enable CONFIG_MODVERSIONS as-is. I'm
> _hoping_ it's just Debian that wants this, and we'd need to get some
> input from the Debian people whether that "control vermagic" is
> sufficient? I suspect it isn't, but I can't come up with any simple
> alternate model either..

Oddly, I just posted a patch to enable this for Fedora and then someone
pointed me at this thread. :-/

Sorry for chiming in late, but yes RHEL is a big user of MODVERSIONS for our
kabi protection work.  Despite our best intentions we still have lots of
partners and customers that provide value-add out-of-tree drivers to their
customers.  These module builders requested we have a mechanism to allow
rolling modules forward for each of our minor RHEL updates without breaking
their drivers.

They requested this to save time and money on rebuilding and retesting.  It
also helps deal with situations where RHEL puts out a security fix or new
minor release and the provider of OOT driver has not released the
appropriate update.  Customers like the ability to roll their special
drivers forward quickly to their schedule.

Now we don't protect every symbol, just a select few that our meets our
customers needs (and developers willing to support it).

Anyway, MODVERSIONS is our way of protecting our kabi for the last 10 years.
It isn't perfect and we have fixed the genksyms tool over the years, but so
far it mostly works fine.

I am not sure what 'control vermagic' is, but it sounds like a string check,
which won't protect against the boatload of backports we do to structs,
enums, and functions.

Currently we are exploring various ways to get smarter here.  The genksyms
tool has its limitations and handling kabi hacks in RHEL is getting
tiresome.

I think GregKH pointed to one such tool, libabigail?  We are working on
others too.


Circling back to enabling MODVERSIONS in Fedora, that was to start the
process of syncing Fedora with RHEL stuff in preparation for smarter tools.


If you take away MODVERSIONS, that would put a damper in our work, but
easily carried privately (much like MODSIGNING for 8 years until it went
upstream :-) ).


We would prefer to work with various folks to figure out a better solution
to solve our/others needs.  Anyone interested in working with Red Hat should
contact Stanislav Kozina (skozina@redhat.com) (cc'd above) and cc myself.

Cheers,
Don



> 
> I'm also somewhat surprised that it's Debian that has this problem,
> considering how Debian is usually the distro that is _least_ receptive
> to various non-free binaries.
> 
>             Linus
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 1, 2016, 4:32 a.m. UTC | #7
On Wed, 30 Nov 2016 23:13:25 -0500
Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 10:40:02AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> wrote:  
> > >
> > > Here's an initial rough hack at removing modversions. It gives an idea
> > > of the complexity we're carrying for this feature (keeping in mind most
> > > of the lines removed are generated parser).  
> > 
> > You definitely don't have to try to convince me. We've had many issues
> > with modversions over the years. This was just the "last drop" as far
> > as I'm concerned, we've had random odd crc generation failures due to
> > some build races too.
> >   
> > > In its place I just added a simple config option to override vermagic
> > > so distros can manage it entirely themselves.  
> > 
> > So at least Fedora doesn't even enable CONFIG_MODVERSIONS as-is. I'm
> > _hoping_ it's just Debian that wants this, and we'd need to get some
> > input from the Debian people whether that "control vermagic" is
> > sufficient? I suspect it isn't, but I can't come up with any simple
> > alternate model either..  
> 
> Oddly, I just posted a patch to enable this for Fedora and then someone
> pointed me at this thread. :-/
> 
> Sorry for chiming in late, but yes RHEL is a big user of MODVERSIONS for our
> kabi protection work.  Despite our best intentions we still have lots of
> partners and customers that provide value-add out-of-tree drivers to their
> customers.  These module builders requested we have a mechanism to allow
> rolling modules forward for each of our minor RHEL updates without breaking
> their drivers.
> 
> They requested this to save time and money on rebuilding and retesting.  It
> also helps deal with situations where RHEL puts out a security fix or new
> minor release and the provider of OOT driver has not released the
> appropriate update.  Customers like the ability to roll their special
> drivers forward quickly to their schedule.
> 
> Now we don't protect every symbol, just a select few that our meets our
> customers needs (and developers willing to support it).
> 
> Anyway, MODVERSIONS is our way of protecting our kabi for the last 10 years.
> It isn't perfect and we have fixed the genksyms tool over the years, but so
> far it mostly works fine.

Okay. It would be good to get all the distros in on this.

What I want to do is work out exactly what it is that modversions is
giving you.

We know it's fairly nasty code to maintain and it does not detect ABI
changes very well. But it's not such a burden that we can't maintain
it if there are good reasons to keep it.

> I am not sure what 'control vermagic' is, but it sounds like a string check,
> which won't protect against the boatload of backports we do to structs,
> enums, and functions.

Basically vermagic is the string all modules and the kernel get, which
must match in order to load modules. If you have modversions disabled,
then vermagic includes the kernel version. If modversions is enabled,
then vermagic does not include the kernel version but the CRCs have to
also match.

Controlling it explicitly is just a couple of lines where a distro can
control it (so they can update their kernel version without breaking).
It's not meant to solve everything, just the first one.
 
> Currently we are exploring various ways to get smarter here.  The genksyms
> tool has its limitations and handling kabi hacks in RHEL is getting
> tiresome.
> 
> I think GregKH pointed to one such tool, libabigail?  We are working on
> others too.
> 
> 
> Circling back to enabling MODVERSIONS in Fedora, that was to start the
> process of syncing Fedora with RHEL stuff in preparation for smarter tools.
> 
> 
> If you take away MODVERSIONS, that would put a damper in our work, but
> easily carried privately (much like MODSIGNING for 8 years until it went
> upstream :-) ).

I don't think that's necessary. A feature requirement for a distro is just
as valid as any other user of upstream. I don't want to hinder any distro,
I'm just still not quite seeing the big picture of exactly what functionality
you need from the kernel.

Thanks,
Nick
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Stanislav Kozina Dec. 1, 2016, 10:48 a.m. UTC | #8
On 12/01/2016 05:13 AM, Don Zickus wrote:

...

> I think GregKH pointed to one such tool, libabigail?  We are working on
> others too.

I should mention one of the others here:
https://github.com/skozina/kabi-dw

It's quite comparable to libabigail in the way it works, the main 
differences are:
  - written in pure C
  - depends only on elf-utils and flex/yacc
  - it's much simpler (4k LOC)
  - stores the type information in the text files and compares those 
instead of directly comparing two sets of DWARF data

Regards,
-Stanislav
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 1, 2016, 11:09 a.m. UTC | #9
On Thu, 1 Dec 2016 11:48:09 +0100
Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 12/01/2016 05:13 AM, Don Zickus wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> > I think GregKH pointed to one such tool, libabigail?  We are working on
> > others too.  
> 
> I should mention one of the others here:
> https://github.com/skozina/kabi-dw
> 
> It's quite comparable to libabigail in the way it works, the main 
> differences are:
>   - written in pure C
>   - depends only on elf-utils and flex/yacc
>   - it's much simpler (4k LOC)
>   - stores the type information in the text files and compares those 
> instead of directly comparing two sets of DWARF data

Now this seems much better for distro ABI checking.

The next question is, do they need any kernel support for rare cases
where they do have to break the ABI of an export? Simple rename of the
function with a _v2 postfix might be enough. We could retain some per
symbol versioning in the kernel if needed, but how much would it
actually help?

Thanks,
Nick
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Stanislav Kozina Dec. 1, 2016, 11:33 a.m. UTC | #10
On 12/01/2016 12:09 PM, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Dec 2016 11:48:09 +0100
> Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> On 12/01/2016 05:13 AM, Don Zickus wrote:
>>
>> ...
>>
>>> I think GregKH pointed to one such tool, libabigail?  We are working on
>>> others too.
>> I should mention one of the others here:
>> https://github.com/skozina/kabi-dw
>>
>> It's quite comparable to libabigail in the way it works, the main
>> differences are:
>>    - written in pure C
>>    - depends only on elf-utils and flex/yacc
>>    - it's much simpler (4k LOC)
>>    - stores the type information in the text files and compares those
>> instead of directly comparing two sets of DWARF data
> Now this seems much better for distro ABI checking.
>
> The next question is, do they need any kernel support for rare cases
> where they do have to break the ABI of an export? Simple rename of the
> function with a _v2 postfix might be enough. We could retain some per
> symbol versioning in the kernel if needed, but how much would it
> actually help?

The biggest pain point AFAICT is to identify what types (functions, 
structs, enums, ...) should be considered a part of the stable ABI. And 
the problem with modversions is that it pulls in just everything which 
gets (accidentally?) #included in the source file.
The actual ABI maintenance is a different problem, but there are many 
possible approaches, the _v2 suffix being one of them.

Regards,
-Stanislav
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 1, 2016, 12:39 p.m. UTC | #11
On Thu, 1 Dec 2016 12:33:02 +0100
Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 12/01/2016 12:09 PM, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > On Thu, 1 Dec 2016 11:48:09 +0100
> > Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
> >  
> >> On 12/01/2016 05:13 AM, Don Zickus wrote:
> >>
> >> ...
> >>  
> >>> I think GregKH pointed to one such tool, libabigail?  We are working on
> >>> others too.  
> >> I should mention one of the others here:
> >> https://github.com/skozina/kabi-dw
> >>
> >> It's quite comparable to libabigail in the way it works, the main
> >> differences are:
> >>    - written in pure C
> >>    - depends only on elf-utils and flex/yacc
> >>    - it's much simpler (4k LOC)
> >>    - stores the type information in the text files and compares those
> >> instead of directly comparing two sets of DWARF data  
> > Now this seems much better for distro ABI checking.
> >
> > The next question is, do they need any kernel support for rare cases
> > where they do have to break the ABI of an export? Simple rename of the
> > function with a _v2 postfix might be enough. We could retain some per
> > symbol versioning in the kernel if needed, but how much would it
> > actually help?  
> 
> The biggest pain point AFAICT is to identify what types (functions, 
> structs, enums, ...) should be considered a part of the stable ABI.

Sure. This is something an automated checker can't solve completely.
Any changes would have to be considered in terms of their impact to
the ABI. It's not just data but also instruction changes involved.

This is policy that should not be mandated by the kernel. Which is
why I'm in favor of using tools like this and just providing mechanism
so distros can implement their own polices.

> And 
> the problem with modversions is that it pulls in just everything which 
> gets (accidentally?) #included in the source file.

I think that's SRCVERSION which is something else. But modversions
has problems too.

> The actual ABI maintenance is a different problem, but there are many 
> possible approaches, the _v2 suffix being one of them.

Would be good to get a consensus on that too.

Thanks,
Nick
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Dodji Seketeli Dec. 1, 2016, 3:19 p.m. UTC | #12
Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> a écrit:

[...]

> On Thu, 1 Dec 2016 11:48:09 +0100
> Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> On 12/01/2016 05:13 AM, Don Zickus wrote:
>> 
>> ...
>> 
>> > I think GregKH pointed to one such tool, libabigail?  We are working on
>> > others too.  
>> 
>> I should mention one of the others here:
>> https://github.com/skozina/kabi-dw

[...]

> Now this seems much better for distro ABI checking.

Right, Incidentally, Fedora does distro-wide ABI verfication for
userspace libraries updates in a given stable distribution.  You can
look at an example of output of the libabigail-based tool that compares
a new version of an ELF library to it's latest stable version:

https://taskotron.fedoraproject.org/artifacts/all/a55cbac8-ab64-11e6-94e0-525400120b80/task_output/curl-7.51.0-2.fc25.log

The results of those ABI comparison can browsed at https://taskotron.fedoraproject.org/resultsdb/results?testcase_name=dist.abicheck.

Of course, you can run the comparison yourself by using a
libabigail-based tool like
https://sourceware.org/libabigail/manual/abipkgdiff.html which takes
.deb and .rpm packages.

We are currently working on making libabigail-based tools understand
Linux kernel specifities so that we can run that kind of analysis on
Kernel updates too.  Ideally, when this is done, you should be able to
just use abipkgdiff on two Linux Kernel packages and get the same kind
of output.

> The next question is, do they need any kernel support for rare cases
> where they do have to break the ABI of an export? Simple rename of the
> function with a _v2 postfix might be enough. We could retain some per
> symbol versioning in the kernel if needed, but how much would it
> actually help?

As a reviewer of the ABI change report emitted by the tool, if what you
want is to say "I reviewed that ABI change and it's OK, so please do not
show it to me next time", then you can feed the tool with a "suppression
specification".  It's a text file in the INI syntax in which you can
specify the kind of change you want the tool to suppress from its
output: https://sourceware.org/libabigail/manual/libabigail-concepts.html.

So I don't think you need to do anything to the source code of the
Kernel in the cases where you need to change the ABI.  Just tell the
tool about that change.

Cheers,
Don Zickus Dec. 1, 2016, 3:20 p.m. UTC | #13
On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 03:32:15PM +1100, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > Anyway, MODVERSIONS is our way of protecting our kabi for the last 10 years.
> > It isn't perfect and we have fixed the genksyms tool over the years, but so
> > far it mostly works fine.
> 
> Okay. It would be good to get all the distros in on this.
> 
> What I want to do is work out exactly what it is that modversions is
> giving you.
> 
> We know it's fairly nasty code to maintain and it does not detect ABI
> changes very well. But it's not such a burden that we can't maintain
> it if there are good reasons to keep it.

Hi Nick,

I won't disagree with you there. :-)

modversions is a pretty heavy handed approach that basically says if all the
symbols and types haven't changed for a given EXPORT_SYMBOL (recursively
checked), then there is a high degree of confidence the OOT driver will not
only load, but run correctly.

The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?

We have plenty of customers with 10 year old drivers, where the expertise
has long left the company.  The engineers still around, recompile and make
tweaks to get things working on the latest RHEL.  Verify it passes testing
and release it.  Then they hope to not touch it again for a few years until
the next RHEL comes along.

Scary, huh? :-)

Common examples, filesystems and storage drivers.


There is no way that I see to provide a 100% guarantee, but if we do enough
checks, we should be able to have a high degree of confidence the driver
won't blow up.

On the flip side, easy things in the kernel to do is:

- provide the memory allocation (instead of having the driver staticly
  allocate)
- provide functions to retrieve various internal data (instead of having the
  driver do direct referencing to deep internal elements)
- cut down on some static inlines (and use accessory functions instead),
  etc.

Those types of changes allow the OOT driver to be more ignorant of kernel
changes and struct modifications.


Look to Stanislav's responses for his ideas on new tooling.

Thanks for helping!

Cheers,
Don


> 
> > I am not sure what 'control vermagic' is, but it sounds like a string check,
> > which won't protect against the boatload of backports we do to structs,
> > enums, and functions.
> 
> Basically vermagic is the string all modules and the kernel get, which
> must match in order to load modules. If you have modversions disabled,
> then vermagic includes the kernel version. If modversions is enabled,
> then vermagic does not include the kernel version but the CRCs have to
> also match.
> 
> Controlling it explicitly is just a couple of lines where a distro can
> control it (so they can update their kernel version without breaking).
> It's not meant to solve everything, just the first one.
>  
> > Currently we are exploring various ways to get smarter here.  The genksyms
> > tool has its limitations and handling kabi hacks in RHEL is getting
> > tiresome.
> > 
> > I think GregKH pointed to one such tool, libabigail?  We are working on
> > others too.
> > 
> > 
> > Circling back to enabling MODVERSIONS in Fedora, that was to start the
> > process of syncing Fedora with RHEL stuff in preparation for smarter tools.
> > 
> > 
> > If you take away MODVERSIONS, that would put a damper in our work, but
> > easily carried privately (much like MODSIGNING for 8 years until it went
> > upstream :-) ).
> 
> I don't think that's necessary. A feature requirement for a distro is just
> as valid as any other user of upstream. I don't want to hinder any distro,
> I'm just still not quite seeing the big picture of exactly what functionality
> you need from the kernel.
> 
> Thanks,
> Nick
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Christoph Hellwig Dec. 1, 2016, 3:26 p.m. UTC | #14
On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 10:20:39AM -0500, Don Zickus wrote:
> 
> - provide the memory allocation (instead of having the driver staticly
>   allocate)
> - provide functions to retrieve various internal data (instead of having the
>   driver do direct referencing to deep internal elements)
> - cut down on some static inlines (and use accessory functions instead),
>   etc.
> 
> Those types of changes allow the OOT driver to be more ignorant of kernel
> changes and struct modifications.

All that is counter to what we really want to have:  a well integrated
kernel that moves forward together so that we can see and improve the
whole situation.  No need to make things worse just to help leeches.
Get your damn drivers upstream ASAP and let's stop this discussion..
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Don Zickus Dec. 1, 2016, 3:40 p.m. UTC | #15
On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 07:26:09AM -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 10:20:39AM -0500, Don Zickus wrote:
> > 
> > - provide the memory allocation (instead of having the driver staticly
> >   allocate)
> > - provide functions to retrieve various internal data (instead of having the
> >   driver do direct referencing to deep internal elements)
> > - cut down on some static inlines (and use accessory functions instead),
> >   etc.
> > 
> > Those types of changes allow the OOT driver to be more ignorant of kernel
> > changes and struct modifications.
> 
> All that is counter to what we really want to have:  a well integrated
> kernel that moves forward together so that we can see and improve the
> whole situation.  No need to make things worse just to help leeches.
> Get your damn drivers upstream ASAP and let's stop this discussion..

I understand and won't disagree with you. :-)

Unfortunately, there are various drivers that will never go upstream

- paid storage drivers that provide bells and whistles on top of inbox
  driver
- old drivers/fs that application has been relying on for a long time but
  company doesn't have resources to migrate to current technology.

We have been trying over the years to do what we can to move customers in
the right direction.  It is just a slow process, sadly.

Cheers,
Don

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Greg KH Dec. 1, 2016, 4:06 p.m. UTC | #16
On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 10:40:59AM -0500, Don Zickus wrote:
> Unfortunately, there are various drivers that will never go upstream
> 
> - paid storage drivers that provide bells and whistles on top of inbox
>   driver

That's because the developer doesn't want them upstream, that's their
fault, nothing we can do about them.

> - old drivers/fs that application has been relying on for a long time but
>   company doesn't have resources to migrate to current technology.

That's what drivers/staging/ is for, I'll take anything that builds (and
sometimes stuff that doesn't build) as long as people are actually using
it.  So send the stuff that is in this category on to me and that will
reduce your burden a _lot_.

thanks,

greg k-h
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Michal Marek Dec. 1, 2016, 4:12 p.m. UTC | #17
On 2016-12-01 04:39, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> On Thu, 01 Dec 2016 02:35:54 +0000
> Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
>> As I understand it, genksyms incorporates the definitions of a
>> function's parameter and return types - not just their names - and all
>> the types they refer to, recursively.  So a structure size change
>> should change the version of all functions where the function and its
>> caller pass that structure between them, however indirectly.  It finds
>> such indirect ABI breakage for me fairly regularly, though of course I
>> don't know that it finds everything.
> 
> It is only the type name.
> 
> Not only that but even if you did extend it further to structure type
> arrangement then you still have to deal with other structures followed
> via pointers. Or (rarer but not unheard of):
> 
> - changes to structures without changes of the types of their members
> - changes to arguments without changes of their type

This is already covered by genksyms. Try make V=1 with
CONFIG_MODVERSIONS=y and add the -D option to one of the genksyms
command. I wanted to paste the expanded signature for
register_filesystem() as an example, but vger would probably drop the
mail for being too big :).


> - changes to semantics of functions
> - data structures derived in ways other than exported symbols, e.g.,
>   fixed register for `current` on some archs

Right, this is something that genksyms has no idea about.

Michal
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Michal Marek Dec. 1, 2016, 4:14 p.m. UTC | #18
On 2016-12-01 05:13, Don Zickus wrote:
> Sorry for chiming in late, but yes RHEL is a big user of MODVERSIONS for our
> kabi protection work.  Despite our best intentions we still have lots of
> partners and customers that provide value-add out-of-tree drivers to their
> customers.  These module builders requested we have a mechanism to allow
> rolling modules forward for each of our minor RHEL updates without breaking
> their drivers.

FWIW, in SLES we use CONFIG_MODVERSION for pretty much the same reasons
you listed. We also enable it in openSUSE, but there it's not as crucial.

Michal
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Don Zickus Dec. 1, 2016, 6:42 p.m. UTC | #19
On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 05:06:11PM +0100, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 10:40:59AM -0500, Don Zickus wrote:
> > Unfortunately, there are various drivers that will never go upstream
> > 
> > - paid storage drivers that provide bells and whistles on top of inbox
> >   driver
> 
> That's because the developer doesn't want them upstream, that's their
> fault, nothing we can do about them.
> 
> > - old drivers/fs that application has been relying on for a long time but
> >   company doesn't have resources to migrate to current technology.
> 
> That's what drivers/staging/ is for, I'll take anything that builds (and
> sometimes stuff that doesn't build) as long as people are actually using
> it.  So send the stuff that is in this category on to me and that will
> reduce your burden a _lot_.

Hi Greg,

I will forward this offer to the right folks and see who we can get to bite.
:-)  Thanks!

Cheers,
Don
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Hannes Frederic Sowa Dec. 2, 2016, 2:36 p.m. UTC | #20
On 01.12.2016 17:12, Michal Marek wrote:
> On 2016-12-01 04:39, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
>> On Thu, 01 Dec 2016 02:35:54 +0000
>> Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
>>> As I understand it, genksyms incorporates the definitions of a
>>> function's parameter and return types - not just their names - and all
>>> the types they refer to, recursively.  So a structure size change
>>> should change the version of all functions where the function and its
>>> caller pass that structure between them, however indirectly.  It finds
>>> such indirect ABI breakage for me fairly regularly, though of course I
>>> don't know that it finds everything.
>>
>> It is only the type name.
>>
>> Not only that but even if you did extend it further to structure type
>> arrangement then you still have to deal with other structures followed
>> via pointers. Or (rarer but not unheard of):
>>
>> - changes to structures without changes of the types of their members
>> - changes to arguments without changes of their type
> 
> This is already covered by genksyms. Try make V=1 with
> CONFIG_MODVERSIONS=y and add the -D option to one of the genksyms
> command. I wanted to paste the expanded signature for
> register_filesystem() as an example, but vger would probably drop the
> mail for being too big :).

It is easier to just use e.g. `make net/core/dev.symtypes` and look at
the generated file.

Bye,
Hannes
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 9, 2016, 3:33 a.m. UTC | #21
On Thu, 1 Dec 2016 17:12:41 +0100
Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.com> wrote:

> On 2016-12-01 04:39, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > On Thu, 01 Dec 2016 02:35:54 +0000
> > Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:  
> >> As I understand it, genksyms incorporates the definitions of a
> >> function's parameter and return types - not just their names - and all
> >> the types they refer to, recursively.  So a structure size change
> >> should change the version of all functions where the function and its
> >> caller pass that structure between them, however indirectly.  It finds
> >> such indirect ABI breakage for me fairly regularly, though of course I
> >> don't know that it finds everything.  
> > 
> > It is only the type name.
> > 
> > Not only that but even if you did extend it further to structure type
> > arrangement then you still have to deal with other structures followed
> > via pointers. Or (rarer but not unheard of):
> > 
> > - changes to structures without changes of the types of their members
> > - changes to arguments without changes of their type  
> 
> This is already covered by genksyms. Try make V=1 with
> CONFIG_MODVERSIONS=y and add the -D option to one of the genksyms
> command. I wanted to paste the expanded signature for
> register_filesystem() as an example, but vger would probably drop the
> mail for being too big :).

Well I simply tested the outcome. If you have:

struct blah {
  int x;
};
int foo(struct blah *blah)
{
  return blah->x;
}
EXPORT(foo);

$ nm vmlinux | grep __crc_foo
00000000a0cf13a0 A __crc_foo

Now change to

struct blah {
  int y;
  int x;
};

$ nm vmlinux | grep __crc_foo
00000000a0cf13a0 A __crc_foo

It just doesn't catch these things. Honestly, stable ABI distros *have*
to review all patches to ensure the ABI is unchanged. Some tools could
help significantly, but for that, the debug info ABI checking tools that
have been mentioned in this thread are far better tool for this job than
modversions.

Thanks,
Nick
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 9, 2016, 3:50 a.m. UTC | #22
On Thu, 1 Dec 2016 10:20:39 -0500
Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 03:32:15PM +1100, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > > Anyway, MODVERSIONS is our way of protecting our kabi for the last 10 years.
> > > It isn't perfect and we have fixed the genksyms tool over the years, but so
> > > far it mostly works fine.  
> > 
> > Okay. It would be good to get all the distros in on this.
> > 
> > What I want to do is work out exactly what it is that modversions is
> > giving you.
> > 
> > We know it's fairly nasty code to maintain and it does not detect ABI
> > changes very well. But it's not such a burden that we can't maintain
> > it if there are good reasons to keep it.  
> 
> Hi Nick,
> 
> I won't disagree with you there. :-)

Sorry for the late reply, I was moving house and got side tracked.

> modversions is a pretty heavy handed approach that basically says if all the
> symbols and types haven't changed for a given EXPORT_SYMBOL (recursively
> checked), then there is a high degree of confidence the OOT driver will not
> only load, but run correctly.

It's heavy handed in that it is quite complex in the kernel build system,
but it is also light handed in that it does not do a very good job.

I would say the degree of confidence is not very high. People have told
me modversions follows pointers to objects in its calculation, but I have
not seen that to be the case. Even if you did have that, it can not replace
a code review for semantics of data and code.

> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?

As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
superior (not that I've tested them).

> 
> We have plenty of customers with 10 year old drivers, where the expertise
> has long left the company.  The engineers still around, recompile and make
> tweaks to get things working on the latest RHEL.  Verify it passes testing
> and release it.  Then they hope to not touch it again for a few years until
> the next RHEL comes along.
> 
> Scary, huh? :-)

Oh yeah my aim here is not to make distro or out of tree module vendors
life harder, actually the opposite. If it turns out modversions really is
the best approach, I'm not in a position to complain about its complexity
because we have Suse and Redhat people maintaining the build and module
systems :) I just want to see if we can do things better.

Thanks,
Nick
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Stanislav Kozina Dec. 9, 2016, 7:55 a.m. UTC | #23
>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?
> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
> superior (not that I've tested them).

On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also 
verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I 
believe that any other solution should still generate some form of 
checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on 
module load.
It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just 
parse DWARF data instead of the C code.

Regards,
-Stanislav
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 9, 2016, 8:14 a.m. UTC | #24
On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 08:55:51 +0100
Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:

> >> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?  
> > As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
> > debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
> > superior (not that I've tested them).  
> 
> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also 
> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I 
> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of 
> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on 
> module load.
> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just 
> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.

A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?

Thanks,
Nick
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Stanislav Kozina Dec. 9, 2016, 2:36 p.m. UTC | #25
>>>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?
>>> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
>>> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
>>> superior (not that I've tested them).
>> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
>> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
>> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
>> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
>> module load.
>> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
>> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.
> A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
> can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
> have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?

 From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some 
modules while maintaining it for others.
In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported 
symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type 
(in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).

Thanks,
-Stanislav
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Ian Campbell Dec. 9, 2016, 3:21 p.m. UTC | #26
On Fri, 2016-12-09 at 13:33 +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:

> Well I simply tested the outcome. If you have:
> 
> struct blah {
>   int x;
> };
> int foo(struct blah *blah)
> {
>   return blah->x;
> }
> EXPORT(foo);
> 
> $ nm vmlinux | grep __crc_foo
> 00000000a0cf13a0 A __crc_foo
> 
> Now change to
> 
> struct blah {
>   int y;
>   int x;
> };
> 
> $ nm vmlinux | grep __crc_foo
> 00000000a0cf13a0 A __crc_foo
> 
> It just doesn't catch these things.

I found the same when I just added your snippet to init/main.c.

_But_ when I moved the struct into include/types.h (which happened to
be included by init/main.c) then, with just x in the struct:

    $ make -s init/main.{o,symtypes} && grep -E foo\|blah init/main.symtypes && nm init/main.o  | grep __crc_foo
    s#blah struct blah { int x ; } 
    foo int foo ( s#blah * ) 
    000000000cd0312e A __crc_foo

but adding y:

    $ make -s init/main.{o,symtypes} && grep -E foo\|blah init/main.symtypes && nm init/main.o  | grep __crc_foo
    s#blah struct blah { int x ; int y ; } 
    foo int foo ( s#blah * ) 
    00000000eda220c6 A __crc_foo

So it does catch things in that case.

With struct blah inline in main.c it was:

    $ make -s init/main.{o,symtypes} && grep -E foo\|blah init/main.symtypes && nm init/main.o  | grep __crc_foo
    s#blah struct blah { UNKNOWN } 
    foo int foo ( s#blah * ) 
    00000000a0cf13a0 A __crc_foo

So I suppose it only cares about structs which are in headers, which I
guess makes sense. I think it is working in at least one of the
important cases.

Ian.
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 9, 2016, 3:56 p.m. UTC | #27
On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 15:36:04 +0100
Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:

> >>>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?  
> >>> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
> >>> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
> >>> superior (not that I've tested them).  
> >> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
> >> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
> >> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
> >> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
> >> module load.
> >> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
> >> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.  
> > A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
> > can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
> > have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?  
> 
>  From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some 
> modules while maintaining it for others.
> In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported 
> symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type 
> (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).

Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?

Thanks,
Nick
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Greg KH Dec. 9, 2016, 4:03 p.m. UTC | #28
On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 01:56:53AM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 15:36:04 +0100
> Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > >>>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?  
> > >>> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
> > >>> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
> > >>> superior (not that I've tested them).  
> > >> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
> > >> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
> > >> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
> > >> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
> > >> module load.
> > >> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
> > >> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.  
> > > A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
> > > can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
> > > have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?  
> > 
> >  From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some 
> > modules while maintaining it for others.
> > In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported 
> > symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type 
> > (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).
> 
> Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
> or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?

There are other ways that distros can work around when upstream "breaks"
the ABI, sometimes they can rename functions, and others they can
"preload" structures with padding in anticipation for when/if fields get
added to them.  But that's all up to the distros, no need for us to
worry about that at all :)

thanks,

greg k-h
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 9, 2016, 4:15 p.m. UTC | #29
On Fri, 09 Dec 2016 15:21:33 +0000
Ian Campbell <ijc@hellion.org.uk> wrote:

> On Fri, 2016-12-09 at 13:33 +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > 
> > Well I simply tested the outcome. If you have:
> > 
> > struct blah {
> >   int x;
> > };
> > int foo(struct blah *blah)
> > {
> >   return blah->x;
> > }
> > EXPORT(foo);
> > 
> > $ nm vmlinux | grep __crc_foo
> > 00000000a0cf13a0 A __crc_foo
> > 
> > Now change to
> > 
> > struct blah {
> >   int y;
> >   int x;
> > };
> > 
> > $ nm vmlinux | grep __crc_foo
> > 00000000a0cf13a0 A __crc_foo
> > 
> > It just doesn't catch these things.  
> 
> I found the same when I just added your snippet to init/main.c.
> 
> _But_ when I moved the struct into include/types.h (which happened to
> be included by init/main.c) then, with just x in the struct:
> 
>     $ make -s init/main.{o,symtypes} && grep -E foo\|blah init/main.symtypes && nm init/main.o  | grep __crc_foo
>     s#blah struct blah { int x ; } 
>     foo int foo ( s#blah * ) 
>     000000000cd0312e A __crc_foo
> 
> but adding y:
> 
>     $ make -s init/main.{o,symtypes} && grep -E foo\|blah init/main.symtypes && nm init/main.o  | grep __crc_foo
>     s#blah struct blah { int x ; int y ; } 
>     foo int foo ( s#blah * ) 
>     00000000eda220c6 A __crc_foo
> 
> So it does catch things in that case.
> 
> With struct blah inline in main.c it was:
> 
>     $ make -s init/main.{o,symtypes} && grep -E foo\|blah init/main.symtypes && nm init/main.o  | grep __crc_foo
>     s#blah struct blah { UNKNOWN } 
>     foo int foo ( s#blah * ) 
>     00000000a0cf13a0 A __crc_foo
> 
> So I suppose it only cares about structs which are in headers, which I
> guess makes sense. I think it is working in at least one of the
> important cases.

Aha thanks, well that's my mistake. Clever little bugger, isn't it? Okay
it's not so useless as I first thought!

That said, a dwarf based checker tool should be able to do as good a job
(maybe a bit better because report is very informative and it may pick up
compiler alignments or padding options). So I still think it's worth
looking at those if we can remove modversions.

Thanks,
Nick
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Don Zickus Dec. 9, 2016, 4:16 p.m. UTC | #30
On Fri, Dec 09, 2016 at 01:50:41PM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > 
> > We have plenty of customers with 10 year old drivers, where the expertise
> > has long left the company.  The engineers still around, recompile and make
> > tweaks to get things working on the latest RHEL.  Verify it passes testing
> > and release it.  Then they hope to not touch it again for a few years until
> > the next RHEL comes along.
> > 
> > Scary, huh? :-)
> 
> Oh yeah my aim here is not to make distro or out of tree module vendors
> life harder, actually the opposite. If it turns out modversions really is
> the best approach, I'm not in a position to complain about its complexity
> because we have Suse and Redhat people maintaining the build and module
> systems :) I just want to see if we can do things better.

Hi Nick,

I think we are in pretty good agreement here.  We can do better than
modversions.  On the flip side, I would hate to see modversions ripped out
until we have an alternate path forward as it does get us by for now. :-)

Cheers,
Don
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Dodji Seketeli Dec. 9, 2016, 10:46 p.m. UTC | #31
Hello,

Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> a écrit:

[...]

> That said, a dwarf based checker tool should be able to do as good a job
> (maybe a bit better because report is very informative and it may pick up
> compiler alignments or padding options).

So, Nicholas was kind enough to send me the two Linux Kernel binaries
that he built with the tiny little interface change that we were
discussing earlier.  Here is what the abidiff[1] tools says about that
interface change:

    $ time ~/git/libabigail/kabidiff/build/tools/abidiff vmlinux.abi1.abi vmlinux.abi2.abi
    Functions changes summary: 0 Removed, 1 Changed, 0 Added function
    Variables changes summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed, 0 Added variable

    1 function with some indirect sub-type change:

      [C]'function int foo(blah*)' at memory.c:82:1 has some indirect sub-type changes:
        parameter 1 of type 'blah*' has sub-type changes:
          in pointed to type 'struct blah' at memory.c:78:1:
            type size changed from 32 to 64 bits
            1 data member insertion:
              'int blah::y', at offset 0 (in bits) at memory.c:79:1
            1 data member change:
             'int blah::x' offset changed from 0 to 32 (in bits) (by +32 bits)



    real	0m2.595s
    user	0m2.489s
    sys	0m0.108s
    $ 

I kept the timing information to give you an idea of the time it takes
on a non-optimized build of abidiff.

One could for instance want that types that are not defined in header
files be kept out of the change report.  In that case it's possible to
write a little suppression specification file like this one:

    $ cat vmlinux.abignore 
    [suppress_type]
      source_location_not_regexp = .*\\.h
    $

You can then pass that suppression file to the tool:

    $ ~/git/libabigail/kabidiff/build/tools/abidiff --suppr vmlinux.abignore vmlinux.abi1.abi vmlinux.abi2.abi
    Functions changes summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed (1 filtered out), 0 Added function
    Variables changes summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed, 0 Added variable


    real	0m2.574s
    user	0m2.473s
    sys	0m0.102s
    $

So this is the kind of interface change analysis tool we are working on
at the moment.

One could also imagine a tool that would compute a CRC that takes the
very same suppression specification files into account, letting people
to decide that some interface changes are OK.  That CRC would thus be
added to the special ELF sections we already have today.  We could keep
the modversion machinery, but with a greater dose of flexibility.
Whenever modversion detects a change, abidiff would tell people what the
change is exactly.

What do you guys think?

[1]: https://sourceware.org/libabigail/manual/abidiff.html
     Okay, the abidiff I used in this message is one that is not yet
     released.  It's source code is in the dodji/kabidiff branch of the
     Git repository at https://sourceware.org/git/?p=libabigail.git;a=summary


Cheers,
Greg KH Dec. 10, 2016, 12:41 p.m. UTC | #32
On Fri, Dec 09, 2016 at 11:46:54PM +0100, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> a écrit:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > That said, a dwarf based checker tool should be able to do as good a job
> > (maybe a bit better because report is very informative and it may pick up
> > compiler alignments or padding options).
> 
> So, Nicholas was kind enough to send me the two Linux Kernel binaries
> that he built with the tiny little interface change that we were
> discussing earlier.  Here is what the abidiff[1] tools says about that
> interface change:
> 
>     $ time ~/git/libabigail/kabidiff/build/tools/abidiff vmlinux.abi1.abi vmlinux.abi2.abi
>     Functions changes summary: 0 Removed, 1 Changed, 0 Added function
>     Variables changes summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed, 0 Added variable
> 
>     1 function with some indirect sub-type change:
> 
>       [C]'function int foo(blah*)' at memory.c:82:1 has some indirect sub-type changes:
>         parameter 1 of type 'blah*' has sub-type changes:
>           in pointed to type 'struct blah' at memory.c:78:1:
>             type size changed from 32 to 64 bits
>             1 data member insertion:
>               'int blah::y', at offset 0 (in bits) at memory.c:79:1
>             1 data member change:
>              'int blah::x' offset changed from 0 to 32 (in bits) (by +32 bits)
> 
> 
> 
>     real	0m2.595s
>     user	0m2.489s
>     sys	0m0.108s
>     $ 
> 
> I kept the timing information to give you an idea of the time it takes
> on a non-optimized build of abidiff.
> 
> One could for instance want that types that are not defined in header
> files be kept out of the change report.  In that case it's possible to
> write a little suppression specification file like this one:
> 
>     $ cat vmlinux.abignore 
>     [suppress_type]
>       source_location_not_regexp = .*\\.h
>     $
> 
> You can then pass that suppression file to the tool:
> 
>     $ ~/git/libabigail/kabidiff/build/tools/abidiff --suppr vmlinux.abignore vmlinux.abi1.abi vmlinux.abi2.abi
>     Functions changes summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed (1 filtered out), 0 Added function
>     Variables changes summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed, 0 Added variable
> 
> 
>     real	0m2.574s
>     user	0m2.473s
>     sys	0m0.102s
>     $
> 
> So this is the kind of interface change analysis tool we are working on
> at the moment.
> 
> One could also imagine a tool that would compute a CRC that takes the
> very same suppression specification files into account, letting people
> to decide that some interface changes are OK.  That CRC would thus be
> added to the special ELF sections we already have today.  We could keep
> the modversion machinery, but with a greater dose of flexibility.
> Whenever modversion detects a change, abidiff would tell people what the
> change is exactly.
> 
> What do you guys think?

YES YES YES!!!

Now I don't work on a distro anymore, but I would think that something
like this would be really useful, pointing out exactly what changed is
very important for distro maintainers to determine what they want to do
(either fix up the abi change with strange hacks, or ignore it due to
the change being in an area they don't care at all about, i.e. a random
driver subsystem.)

So yes, I think this is really good stuff.  But if the distro
maintainers correct me and think it's useless, then I need to revisit my
view of exactly what they do for their customers :)

thanks,

greg k-h
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 12, 2016, 3:50 a.m. UTC | #33
On Sat, 10 Dec 2016 13:41:03 +0100
Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 09, 2016 at 11:46:54PM +0100, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> a écrit:
> > 
> > [...]
> >   
> > > That said, a dwarf based checker tool should be able to do as good a job
> > > (maybe a bit better because report is very informative and it may pick up
> > > compiler alignments or padding options).  
> > 
> > So, Nicholas was kind enough to send me the two Linux Kernel binaries
> > that he built with the tiny little interface change that we were
> > discussing earlier.  Here is what the abidiff[1] tools says about that
> > interface change:
> > 
> >     $ time ~/git/libabigail/kabidiff/build/tools/abidiff vmlinux.abi1.abi vmlinux.abi2.abi
> >     Functions changes summary: 0 Removed, 1 Changed, 0 Added function
> >     Variables changes summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed, 0 Added variable
> > 
> >     1 function with some indirect sub-type change:
> > 
> >       [C]'function int foo(blah*)' at memory.c:82:1 has some indirect sub-type changes:
> >         parameter 1 of type 'blah*' has sub-type changes:
> >           in pointed to type 'struct blah' at memory.c:78:1:
> >             type size changed from 32 to 64 bits
> >             1 data member insertion:
> >               'int blah::y', at offset 0 (in bits) at memory.c:79:1
> >             1 data member change:
> >              'int blah::x' offset changed from 0 to 32 (in bits) (by +32 bits)
> > 
> > 
> > 
> >     real	0m2.595s
> >     user	0m2.489s
> >     sys	0m0.108s
> >     $ 
> > 
> > I kept the timing information to give you an idea of the time it takes
> > on a non-optimized build of abidiff.
> > 
> > One could for instance want that types that are not defined in header
> > files be kept out of the change report.  In that case it's possible to
> > write a little suppression specification file like this one:
> > 
> >     $ cat vmlinux.abignore 
> >     [suppress_type]
> >       source_location_not_regexp = .*\\.h
> >     $
> > 
> > You can then pass that suppression file to the tool:
> > 
> >     $ ~/git/libabigail/kabidiff/build/tools/abidiff --suppr vmlinux.abignore vmlinux.abi1.abi vmlinux.abi2.abi
> >     Functions changes summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed (1 filtered out), 0 Added function
> >     Variables changes summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed, 0 Added variable
> > 
> > 
> >     real	0m2.574s
> >     user	0m2.473s
> >     sys	0m0.102s
> >     $
> > 
> > So this is the kind of interface change analysis tool we are working on
> > at the moment.
> > 
> > One could also imagine a tool that would compute a CRC that takes the
> > very same suppression specification files into account, letting people
> > to decide that some interface changes are OK.  That CRC would thus be
> > added to the special ELF sections we already have today.  We could keep
> > the modversion machinery, but with a greater dose of flexibility.
> > Whenever modversion detects a change, abidiff would tell people what the
> > change is exactly.
> > 
> > What do you guys think?  
> 
> YES YES YES!!!
> 
> Now I don't work on a distro anymore, but I would think that something
> like this would be really useful, pointing out exactly what changed is
> very important for distro maintainers to determine what they want to do
> (either fix up the abi change with strange hacks, or ignore it due to
> the change being in an area they don't care at all about, i.e. a random
> driver subsystem.)
> 
> So yes, I think this is really good stuff.  But if the distro
> maintainers correct me and think it's useless, then I need to revisit my
> view of exactly what they do for their customers :)

Agree completely. BTW (for those who might be looking into these tools),
we also have https://github.com/skozina/kabi-dw that Stanislav (cc'ed)
mentioned earlier.

It's true that the current modversions __crc_ matching infrastructure is
"just" a symbol versioning system, and we could keep it and just populate
it with something other than genksyms (e.g., a symbol version list provided
by distros). But the starting point should be *no* versioning and simply
using names to break linkage. Unless there's a compelling reason not to,
symbols are simpler, easier, everyone knows how they work.

The other question would be whether to pull a minimal tool into the kernel
source or keep them out of tree (but possibly add some helper scripts etc).
I guess we'll need to see what distros want.

Thanks,
Nick
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Ian Campbell Dec. 12, 2016, 9:08 a.m. UTC | #34
On Sat, 2016-12-10 at 13:41 +0100, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> Now I don't work on a distro anymore, but I would think that something
> like this would be really useful, pointing out exactly what changed is
> very important for distro maintainers to determine what they want to do

The .symvers produced by the current scheme aren't completely useless
from this PoV, although they aren't ideal since you need both before an
d after trees and if the changes are large or far reaching the diff can
get a bit unwieldy, so better tooling which points directly to the
actual relevant change would be no bad thing.

Ian.
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Stanislav Kozina Dec. 12, 2016, 9:48 a.m. UTC | #35
>>>> A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
>>>> can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
>>>> have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?
>>>   From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some
>>> modules while maintaining it for others.
>>> In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported
>>> symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type
>>> (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).
>> Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
>> or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?
> There are other ways that distros can work around when upstream "breaks"
> the ABI, sometimes they can rename functions, and others they can
> "preload" structures with padding in anticipation for when/if fields get
> added to them.  But that's all up to the distros, no need for us to
> worry about that at all :)

Currently, the ABI version (checksum) is stored outside of the actual 
code in the __ksymtab section. That means that the distributions can 
still apply upstream patches cleanly and only update the version 
checksum if these break ABI.

With the _v2, _v3 suffixes (or similar solutions) we'd be effectively 
storing the ABI versions directly in the code and that would cause 
conflicts when pulling further patches from upstream.

My view is that it would be than easier to maintain out-of-tree 
modversions (or similar tool) rather than to solve all these conflicts.

Warm Regards,
-Stanislav
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Stanislav Kozina Dec. 13, 2016, 1:07 a.m. UTC | #36
Hello,

>> That said, a dwarf based checker tool should be able to do as good a job
>> (maybe a bit better because report is very informative and it may pick up
>> compiler alignments or padding options).
> So, Nicholas was kind enough to send me the two Linux Kernel binaries
> that he built with the tiny little interface change that we were
> discussing earlier.  Here is what the abidiff[1] tools says about that
> interface change:

Thanks Nicholas and Dodji for this great example, for comparison I think 
it would be nice to share the example run with kabi-dw too.
kabi-dw first dumps and unifies all type information into a set of text 
files, the unification takes a significant time. Then the two sets of 
these text files can be compared.

An example run would look like:
$ time ~/Code/kabi-dw/kabi-dw generate -o abi1 vmlinux.abi1
Generating symbol defs from vmlinux.abi1...

real    0m29.057s
user    0m13.929s
sys    0m14.862s
$ time ~/Code/kabi-dw/kabi-dw generate -o abi2 vmlinux.abi2
Generating symbol defs from vmlinux.abi2...

real    0m29.134s
user    0m13.961s
sys    0m14.921s
$ time ~/Code/kabi-dw/kabi-dw compare abi1 abi2
Changes detected in: 
home/npiggin/src/linux.vectors/mm/memory.c/struct--blah.txt
Inserted:
+0x0 int y;
Shifted:
-0x0 int x;
+0x4 int x;


real    0m0.176s
user    0m0.135s
sys    0m0.040s

The size of the generated text files with all the relevant type 
information is as follows:
$ du -hs abi1
16M    abi1
$ find abi1 -type f | wc -l
3162

Warm regards,
-Stanislav
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 13, 2016, 7:25 a.m. UTC | #37
On Mon, 12 Dec 2016 10:48:47 +0100
Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:

> >>>> A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
> >>>> can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
> >>>> have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?  
> >>>   From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some
> >>> modules while maintaining it for others.
> >>> In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported
> >>> symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type
> >>> (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).  
> >> Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
> >> or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?  
> > There are other ways that distros can work around when upstream "breaks"
> > the ABI, sometimes they can rename functions, and others they can
> > "preload" structures with padding in anticipation for when/if fields get
> > added to them.  But that's all up to the distros, no need for us to
> > worry about that at all :)  
> 
> Currently, the ABI version (checksum) is stored outside of the actual 
> code in the __ksymtab section. That means that the distributions can 
> still apply upstream patches cleanly and only update the version 
> checksum if these break ABI.
> 
> With the _v2, _v3 suffixes (or similar solutions) we'd be effectively 
> storing the ABI versions directly in the code and that would cause 
> conflicts when pulling further patches from upstream.
> 
> My view is that it would be than easier to maintain out-of-tree 
> modversions (or similar tool) rather than to solve all these conflicts.

That kind of name clash should hardly be an issue, in comparison with the
care it requires to merge fixes on top of a backport which has already
changed ABI. It tends to be trivially fixable just by search/replace
in the patchfile before applying, if nothing else. But you probably *want*
to be flagged on those things and merge by hand anyway.

Backporting alone I don't think can justify symbol versioning, but I'd
like to hear from distro maintainers if any disagree.

Thanks,
Nick
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Michal Marek Dec. 13, 2016, 10:51 p.m. UTC | #38
Dne 9.12.2016 v 23:46 Dodji Seketeli napsal(a):
> Hello,
> 
> Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> a écrit:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> That said, a dwarf based checker tool should be able to do as good a job
>> (maybe a bit better because report is very informative and it may pick up
>> compiler alignments or padding options).
> 
> So, Nicholas was kind enough to send me the two Linux Kernel binaries
> that he built with the tiny little interface change that we were
> discussing earlier.  Here is what the abidiff[1] tools says about that
> interface change:
> 
>     $ time ~/git/libabigail/kabidiff/build/tools/abidiff vmlinux.abi1.abi vmlinux.abi2.abi
>     Functions changes summary: 0 Removed, 1 Changed, 0 Added function
>     Variables changes summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed, 0 Added variable
> 
>     1 function with some indirect sub-type change:
> 
>       [C]'function int foo(blah*)' at memory.c:82:1 has some indirect sub-type changes:
>         parameter 1 of type 'blah*' has sub-type changes:
>           in pointed to type 'struct blah' at memory.c:78:1:
>             type size changed from 32 to 64 bits
>             1 data member insertion:
>               'int blah::y', at offset 0 (in bits) at memory.c:79:1
>             1 data member change:
>              'int blah::x' offset changed from 0 to 32 (in bits) (by +32 bits)

For completeness, with a foo.symref file in the tree, genksyms would print

foo.c: warning: foo: modversion changed because of changes in struct blah

So there is some sort of diagnostics already. Does the abidiff tool
handle the case when an exported symbol is moved between .c files? This
is always a mess with genksyms, because the two .c files have different
includes and thus the type expansion stops at different points. So
typically the move needs to be reverted as a workaround.

Michal
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Dodji Seketeli Dec. 14, 2016, 8:58 a.m. UTC | #39
Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.com> a écrit:

[...]

> Does the abidiff tool handle the case when an exported symbol is moved
> between .c files? This is always a mess with genksyms, because the two
> .c files have different includes and thus the type expansion stops at
> different points. So typically the move needs to be reverted as a
> workaround.

Let's consider the function:

  'void foo(struct S*);'

If two ELF binaries contain a definition of that function foo which ELF
symbol is exported, if the type struct S hasn't changed, and if the only
difference between the ELF binaries is that foo was defined in the
translation unit a.c in the first binary and in b.c in the second
binary, then the comparison engine of libabigail (which is the library
that abidiff uses) will consider the declarations of the two foo
functions as being equal -- no matter what include file comes before the
definition point of foo in a.c and b.c.  If it does not, then it's a bug
that ought to be fixed.

If you feel that I haven't understood your question, then I guess a
minimal standalone example (in the form of C source code) that
illustrates your use case could be helpful to me.

Thanks.
Michal Marek Dec. 14, 2016, 9:15 a.m. UTC | #40
On 2016-12-14 09:58, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
> Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.com> a écrit:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> Does the abidiff tool handle the case when an exported symbol is moved
>> between .c files? This is always a mess with genksyms, because the two
>> .c files have different includes and thus the type expansion stops at
>> different points. So typically the move needs to be reverted as a
>> workaround.
> 
> Let's consider the function:
> 
>   'void foo(struct S*);'
> 
> If two ELF binaries contain a definition of that function foo which ELF
> symbol is exported, if the type struct S hasn't changed, and if the only
> difference between the ELF binaries is that foo was defined in the
> translation unit a.c in the first binary and in b.c in the second
> binary, then the comparison engine of libabigail (which is the library
> that abidiff uses) will consider the declarations of the two foo
> functions as being equal -- no matter what include file comes before the
> definition point of foo in a.c and b.c.  If it does not, then it's a bug
> that ought to be fixed.
> 
> If you feel that I haven't understood your question, then I guess a
> minimal standalone example (in the form of C source code) that
> illustrates your use case could be helpful to me.

A minimal example would be

t1.c:
struct s1;
struct s2 {
	int i;
}
struct s3 {
	struct s1 *ptr1;
	struct s2 *ptr2;
}
void foo(struct s3*);
EXPORT_SYMBOL(foo);

t2.c:
struct s1 {
	int j;
}
struct s2;
struct s3 {
	struct s1 *ptr1;
	struct s2 *ptr2;
}
void foo(struct s3*);
EXPORT_SYMBOL(foo);

genksyms expands this to
void foo ( struct s3 { struct s1 { UNKNOWN } * ptr1 ; struct s2 { int i ; } * ptr2 ; } * )

or

void foo ( struct s3 { struct s1 { int j ; } * ptr1 ; struct s2 { UNKNOWN } * ptr2 ; } * )

respectively. The types are the same, but their visibility in the
different compilation units differs.

Michal
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Dodji Seketeli Dec. 14, 2016, 9:36 a.m. UTC | #41
Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.com> a écrit:

[...]

> A minimal example would be
>
> t1.c:
> struct s1;
> struct s2 {
> 	int i;
> }
> struct s3 {
> 	struct s1 *ptr1;
> 	struct s2 *ptr2;
> }
> void foo(struct s3*);
> EXPORT_SYMBOL(foo);
>
> t2.c:
> struct s1 {
> 	int j;
> }
> struct s2;
> struct s3 {
> 	struct s1 *ptr1;
> 	struct s2 *ptr2;
> }
> void foo(struct s3*);
> EXPORT_SYMBOL(foo);
>
> genksyms expands this to
> void foo ( struct s3 { struct s1 { UNKNOWN } * ptr1 ; struct s2 { int i ; } * ptr2 ; } * )
>
> or
>
> void foo ( struct s3 { struct s1 { int j ; } * ptr1 ; struct s2 { UNKNOWN } * ptr2 ; } * )
> respectively.

Thanks, I have built an independant test case from this:

$ cat t1.c
struct s1;
struct s2 {
	int i;
};
struct s3 {
	struct s1 *ptr1;
	struct s2 *ptr2;
};
void foo(struct s3*);
$ cat t2.c
struct s1 {
	int j;
};
struct s2;
struct s3 {
	struct s1 *ptr1;
	struct s2 *ptr2;
};
void foo(struct s3*);
$ gcc -g -c t1.c
$ gcc -g -c t2.c
$ abidiff t1.o t2.o
$ 

So, as you see here, abidiff considers t1.o and t2.o has having the same
ABI, so it considers the two foo functions to be equivalent.

> The types are the same, but their visibility in the different
> compilation units differs.

I see, for genksyms, the order of declarations matters, especially when
forward declarations are involved.

Libabigail does a "whole binary" analysis of types.

So, consider the point of use of the type 'struct s1*'.  Even if 'struct
s' is just forward-declared at that point, the declaration of struct s1
is "resolved" to its definition.  Even if the definition comes later in
the binary.

In other words, if struct s1 is defined in the binary, you'll never have
that "struct s1 {UNKNOWN} *ptr1;" that you see in genksyms's
representation.

Cheers,
Michal Marek Dec. 14, 2016, 9:37 a.m. UTC | #42
On 2016-12-14 10:15, Michal Marek wrote:
> A minimal example would be
> 
> t1.c:
> struct s1;
> struct s2 {
> 	int i;
> }
> struct s3 {
> 	struct s1 *ptr1;
> 	struct s2 *ptr2;
> }
> void foo(struct s3*);
> EXPORT_SYMBOL(foo);
> 
> t2.c:
> struct s1 {
> 	int j;
> }
> struct s2;
> struct s3 {
> 	struct s1 *ptr1;
> 	struct s2 *ptr2;
> }
> void foo(struct s3*);
> EXPORT_SYMBOL(foo);

Note that the above, if passed to genksyms verbatim, would result in
genksyms treating all the types as internal. Here is a complete
example including linemarkers:

$ cat t1.i
# 1 "t1.c"
# 1 "<built-in>"
# 1 "<command-line>"
# 1 "t1.c"
# 1 "t1.h" 1
# 1 "t.h" 1
struct s1;
struct s2;
struct s3 {
 struct s1 *ptr1;
 struct s2 *ptr2;
};
# 2 "t1.h" 2
struct s2 {
 int i;
};
# 2 "t1.c" 2
void foo(struct s3 *s) { }
EXPORT_SYMBOL(foo);

$ cat t2.i
# 1 "t2.c"
# 1 "<built-in>"
# 1 "<command-line>"
# 1 "t2.c"
# 1 "t2.h" 1
# 1 "t.h" 1
struct s1;
struct s2;
struct s3 {
 struct s1 *ptr1;
 struct s2 *ptr2;
};
# 2 "t2.h" 2
struct s1 {
 int j;
};
# 2 "t2.c" 2
void foo(struct s3 *s) { }
EXPORT_SYMBOL(foo);

$ ./scripts/genksyms/genksyms -D <t1.i 
Export foo == <void foo ( struct s3 { struct s1 { UNKNOWN } * ptr1 ; struct s2 { int i ; } * ptr2 ; } * ) >
__crc_foo = 0xf731cef8 ;

$ ./scripts/genksyms/genksyms -D <t2.i 
Export foo == <void foo ( struct s3 { struct s1 { int j ; } * ptr1 ; struct s2 { UNKNOWN } * ptr2 ; } * ) >
__crc_foo = 0xc925dae5 ;

Michal
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Michal Marek Dec. 14, 2016, 9:44 a.m. UTC | #43
On 2016-12-14 10:36, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
> Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.com> a écrit:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> A minimal example would be
>>
>> t1.c:
>> struct s1;
>> struct s2 {
>> 	int i;
>> }
>> struct s3 {
>> 	struct s1 *ptr1;
>> 	struct s2 *ptr2;
>> }
>> void foo(struct s3*);
>> EXPORT_SYMBOL(foo);
>>
>> t2.c:
>> struct s1 {
>> 	int j;
>> }
>> struct s2;
>> struct s3 {
>> 	struct s1 *ptr1;
>> 	struct s2 *ptr2;
>> }
>> void foo(struct s3*);
>> EXPORT_SYMBOL(foo);
>>
>> genksyms expands this to
>> void foo ( struct s3 { struct s1 { UNKNOWN } * ptr1 ; struct s2 { int i ; } * ptr2 ; } * )
>>
>> or
>>
>> void foo ( struct s3 { struct s1 { int j ; } * ptr1 ; struct s2 { UNKNOWN } * ptr2 ; } * )
>> respectively.
> 
> Thanks, I have built an independant test case from this:
> 
> $ cat t1.c
> struct s1;
> struct s2 {
> 	int i;
> };
> struct s3 {
> 	struct s1 *ptr1;
> 	struct s2 *ptr2;
> };
> void foo(struct s3*);
> $ cat t2.c
> struct s1 {
> 	int j;
> };
> struct s2;
> struct s3 {
> 	struct s1 *ptr1;
> 	struct s2 *ptr2;
> };
> void foo(struct s3*);
> $ gcc -g -c t1.c
> $ gcc -g -c t2.c
> $ abidiff t1.o t2.o
> $ 
> 
> So, as you see here, abidiff considers t1.o and t2.o has having the same
> ABI, so it considers the two foo functions to be equivalent.

Wow. That sounds too good to be true.


>> The types are the same, but their visibility in the different
>> compilation units differs.
> 
> I see, for genksyms, the order of declarations matters, especially when
> forward declarations are involved.
> 
> Libabigail does a "whole binary" analysis of types.
> 
> So, consider the point of use of the type 'struct s1*'.  Even if 'struct
> s' is just forward-declared at that point, the declaration of struct s1
> is "resolved" to its definition.  Even if the definition comes later in
> the binary.

But there isn't any definition of struct s1 in t1.o. Does abidiff
"steal" the definition from the other object file? That would be
legitimate, I'm just curious.

Thanks,
Michal
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Dodji Seketeli Dec. 14, 2016, 9:56 a.m. UTC | #44
Dodji Seketeli <dodji@seketeli.org> a écrit:

Grr, I did paste the wrong content of t1.c and t2.c in my last message sorry.

Here are the correct ones:

$ cat t1.c
struct s1;
struct s2 {
	int i;
};
struct s3 {
	struct s1 *ptr1;
	struct s2 *ptr2;
};

void foo(struct s3* s __attribute__((unused)))
{
}

$ cat t2.c
struct s1 {
	int j;
};
struct s2;
struct s3 {
	struct s1 *ptr1;
	struct s2 *ptr2;
};

void foo(struct s3* s __attribute__((unused)))
{
}

$ gcc -g -c t1.c
$ gcc -g -c t2.c
$ abidiff t1.o t2.o
$ 

The rest of my previous message still applies :-)

> So, as you see here, abidiff considers t1.o and t2.o has having the same
> ABI, so it considers the two foo functions to be equivalent.
>
>> The types are the same, but their visibility in the different
>> compilation units differs.
>
> I see, for genksyms, the order of declarations matters, especially when
> forward declarations are involved.
>
> Libabigail does a "whole binary" analysis of types.
>
> So, consider the point of use of the type 'struct s1*'.  Even if 'struct
> s' is just forward-declared at that point, the declaration of struct s1
> is "resolved" to its definition.  Even if the definition comes later in
> the binary.
>
> In other words, if struct s1 is defined in the binary, you'll never have
> that "struct s1 {UNKNOWN} *ptr1;" that you see in genksyms's
> representation.

Thanks.
Dodji Seketeli Dec. 14, 2016, 10:02 a.m. UTC | #45
Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.com> a écrit:

>> Libabigail does a "whole binary" analysis of types.
>> 
>> So, consider the point of use of the type 'struct s1*'.  Even if 'struct
>> s' is just forward-declared at that point, the declaration of struct s1
>> is "resolved" to its definition.  Even if the definition comes later in
>> the binary.
>
> But there isn't any definition of struct s1 in t1.o. Does abidiff
> "steal" the definition from the other object file? That would be
> legitimate, I'm just curious.

If there is another translation unit in the *same* binary that defines
struct s1, then yes, it's "stolen", as you say.

But if in the entire binary, struct s1 is just declared (not defined),
then it'll compare equal to any struct s1 that is defined in the
*second* binary.

Cheers,
Michal Marek Dec. 14, 2016, 10:15 a.m. UTC | #46
On 2016-12-14 11:02, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
> Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.com> a écrit:
> 
>>> Libabigail does a "whole binary" analysis of types.
>>>
>>> So, consider the point of use of the type 'struct s1*'.  Even if 'struct
>>> s' is just forward-declared at that point, the declaration of struct s1
>>> is "resolved" to its definition.  Even if the definition comes later in
>>> the binary.
>>
>> But there isn't any definition of struct s1 in t1.o. Does abidiff
>> "steal" the definition from the other object file? That would be
>> legitimate, I'm just curious.
> 
> If there is another translation unit in the *same* binary that defines
> struct s1, then yes, it's "stolen", as you say.
> 
> But if in the entire binary, struct s1 is just declared (not defined),
> then it'll compare equal to any struct s1 that is defined in the
> *second* binary.

That makes sense, thanks.

Michal

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Hannes Frederic Sowa Dec. 14, 2016, 2:04 p.m. UTC | #47
On 09.12.2016 17:03, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 01:56:53AM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
>> On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 15:36:04 +0100
>> Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>>>>>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?  
>>>>>> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
>>>>>> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
>>>>>> superior (not that I've tested them).  
>>>>> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
>>>>> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
>>>>> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
>>>>> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
>>>>> module load.
>>>>> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
>>>>> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.  
>>>> A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
>>>> can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
>>>> have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?  
>>>
>>>  From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some 
>>> modules while maintaining it for others.
>>> In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported 
>>> symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type 
>>> (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).
>>
>> Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
>> or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?
> 
> There are other ways that distros can work around when upstream "breaks"
> the ABI, sometimes they can rename functions, and others they can
> "preload" structures with padding in anticipation for when/if fields get
> added to them.  But that's all up to the distros, no need for us to
> worry about that at all :)

The _v2 and _v3 functions are probably the ones that also get used by
future backports in the distro kernel itself and are probably the reason
for the ABI change in the first place. Thus going down this route will
basically require distros to touch every future backport patch and will
in general generate a big mess internally.

I think it is important to keep versioning information outside of the
source code. Some kind of modversions will still be required, but
distros should be able to decide if they put in some kind of checksum or
a string, what suites them most.

Thanks,
Hannes (who is still impressed by the genksyms tools)

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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 15, 2016, 2:06 a.m. UTC | #48
On Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:04:36 +0100
Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 09.12.2016 17:03, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 01:56:53AM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:  
> >> On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 15:36:04 +0100
> >> Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
> >>  
> >>>>>>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?    
> >>>>>> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
> >>>>>> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
> >>>>>> superior (not that I've tested them).    
> >>>>> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
> >>>>> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
> >>>>> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
> >>>>> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
> >>>>> module load.
> >>>>> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
> >>>>> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.    
> >>>> A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
> >>>> can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
> >>>> have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?    
> >>>
> >>>  From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some 
> >>> modules while maintaining it for others.
> >>> In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported 
> >>> symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type 
> >>> (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).  
> >>
> >> Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
> >> or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?  
> > 
> > There are other ways that distros can work around when upstream "breaks"
> > the ABI, sometimes they can rename functions, and others they can
> > "preload" structures with padding in anticipation for when/if fields get
> > added to them.  But that's all up to the distros, no need for us to
> > worry about that at all :)  
> 
> The _v2 and _v3 functions are probably the ones that also get used by
> future backports in the distro kernel itself and are probably the reason
> for the ABI change in the first place. Thus going down this route will
> basically require distros to touch every future backport patch and will
> in general generate a big mess internally.

What kind of big mess? You have to check the logic of each backport even
if it does apply cleanly, so the added overhead of the name change should
be relatively tiny, no?

> 
> I think it is important to keep versioning information outside of the
> source code. Some kind of modversions will still be required, but
> distros should be able to decide if they put in some kind of checksum or
> a string, what suites them most.

The module crc symbols are just an integer that requires a match, so it
could easily be populated by a list that the distro keeps, rather than
by genksyms. Most of the complexity is on the build side, so that would
still be an improvement for the kernel. So we *could* do this if the
distros need it.

Thanks,
Nick

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Hannes Frederic Sowa Dec. 15, 2016, 11:19 a.m. UTC | #49
On 15.12.2016 03:06, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:04:36 +0100
> Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 09.12.2016 17:03, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>>> On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 01:56:53AM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:  
>>>> On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 15:36:04 +0100
>>>> Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>>  
>>>>>>>>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?    
>>>>>>>> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
>>>>>>>> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
>>>>>>>> superior (not that I've tested them).    
>>>>>>> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
>>>>>>> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
>>>>>>> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
>>>>>>> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
>>>>>>> module load.
>>>>>>> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
>>>>>>> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.    
>>>>>> A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
>>>>>> can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
>>>>>> have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?    
>>>>>
>>>>>  From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some 
>>>>> modules while maintaining it for others.
>>>>> In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported 
>>>>> symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type 
>>>>> (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).  
>>>>
>>>> Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
>>>> or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?  
>>>
>>> There are other ways that distros can work around when upstream "breaks"
>>> the ABI, sometimes they can rename functions, and others they can
>>> "preload" structures with padding in anticipation for when/if fields get
>>> added to them.  But that's all up to the distros, no need for us to
>>> worry about that at all :)  
>>
>> The _v2 and _v3 functions are probably the ones that also get used by
>> future backports in the distro kernel itself and are probably the reason
>> for the ABI change in the first place. Thus going down this route will
>> basically require distros to touch every future backport patch and will
>> in general generate a big mess internally.
> 
> What kind of big mess? You have to check the logic of each backport even
> if it does apply cleanly, so the added overhead of the name change should
> be relatively tiny, no?

Basically single patches are backported in huge series. Reviewing each
single patch also definitely makes sense, a review of the series as a
whole is much more worthwhile because it focuses more on logic.

The patches themselves are checked by individual robots or humans
against merge conflict introduced mistakes which ring alarm bells for
people to look more closely during review.

Merge conflicts introduced mistakes definitely can happen because
developers/backporters lose the focus from the actual logic but deal
with shifting lines around or just fixing up postfixes to function names.

We still try to align the kernel as much as possible with upstream,
because most developers can't really hold the differences between
upstream and the internal functions in their heads (is this function RMW
safe in this version but not that kernel version...).

Anyway, I don't think we will at any time have multiple versions of a
function exported to 3rd party kernel modules. The headaches are just
too big. Basically we would have to version structs and not functions
(this is our bigger problem), thus exporting new versions of functions
don't really help at all. Having multiple versions of structs really
scares me. ;)

We already pad structs to allow for additional struct members to be
added, which helps a lot.

If versioning of function symbols would be an issue we probably would
have switched to ELF function versioning (like glibc does it) long time ago.

>> I think it is important to keep versioning information outside of the
>> source code. Some kind of modversions will still be required, but
>> distros should be able to decide if they put in some kind of checksum or
>> a string, what suites them most.
> 
> The module crc symbols are just an integer that requires a match, so it
> could easily be populated by a list that the distro keeps, rather than
> by genksyms. Most of the complexity is on the build side, so that would
> still be an improvement for the kernel. So we *could* do this if the
> distros need it.

Like Don also already said, genksyms already did a pretty good job so
far. We are right now working with Dodji to come up with a way to
replace genksyms, in case people really want to have very specific
control about what causes the symbol version to be changed.

Also I wonder what Ben's opinion on this is.. As I understood that he
wants to maintain a super-long-term stable kernel with kabi guarantees.

Note, what we want is to weaken the check for kabi, by excluding parts
of the struct from genksyms with libabigail. For Red Hat genksyms is too
strict in the checks.

Bye,
Hannes

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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 15, 2016, 12:03 p.m. UTC | #50
On Thu, 15 Dec 2016 12:19:02 +0100
Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 15.12.2016 03:06, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > On Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:04:36 +0100
> > Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> On 09.12.2016 17:03, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:  
> >>> On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 01:56:53AM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:    
> >>>> On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 15:36:04 +0100
> >>>> Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
> >>>>    
> >>>>>>>>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?      
> >>>>>>>> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
> >>>>>>>> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
> >>>>>>>> superior (not that I've tested them).      
> >>>>>>> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
> >>>>>>> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
> >>>>>>> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
> >>>>>>> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
> >>>>>>> module load.
> >>>>>>> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
> >>>>>>> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.      
> >>>>>> A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
> >>>>>> can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
> >>>>>> have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?      
> >>>>>
> >>>>>  From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some 
> >>>>> modules while maintaining it for others.
> >>>>> In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported 
> >>>>> symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type 
> >>>>> (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).    
> >>>>
> >>>> Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
> >>>> or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?    
> >>>
> >>> There are other ways that distros can work around when upstream "breaks"
> >>> the ABI, sometimes they can rename functions, and others they can
> >>> "preload" structures with padding in anticipation for when/if fields get
> >>> added to them.  But that's all up to the distros, no need for us to
> >>> worry about that at all :)    
> >>
> >> The _v2 and _v3 functions are probably the ones that also get used by
> >> future backports in the distro kernel itself and are probably the reason
> >> for the ABI change in the first place. Thus going down this route will
> >> basically require distros to touch every future backport patch and will
> >> in general generate a big mess internally.  
> > 
> > What kind of big mess? You have to check the logic of each backport even
> > if it does apply cleanly, so the added overhead of the name change should
> > be relatively tiny, no?  
> 
> Basically single patches are backported in huge series. Reviewing each
> single patch also definitely makes sense, a review of the series as a
> whole is much more worthwhile because it focuses more on logic.
> 
> The patches themselves are checked by individual robots or humans
> against merge conflict introduced mistakes which ring alarm bells for
> people to look more closely during review.
> 
> Merge conflicts introduced mistakes definitely can happen because
> developers/backporters lose the focus from the actual logic but deal
> with shifting lines around or just fixing up postfixes to function names.
> 
> We still try to align the kernel as much as possible with upstream,
> because most developers can't really hold the differences between
> upstream and the internal functions in their heads (is this function RMW
> safe in this version but not that kernel version...).

I agree with all this, but in the case of a function rename, you can
automate it all with scripts if that's what you want.

When you have your list of exported symbols with non-zero version number,
then you can script that __abivXXX into the changeset applying process,
or alternatively apply the rename after your patches are applied, or
use the c preprocessor to define names to something else.

> 
> Anyway, I don't think we will at any time have multiple versions of a
> function exported to 3rd party kernel modules. The headaches are just
> too big. Basically we would have to version structs and not functions
> (this is our bigger problem), thus exporting new versions of functions
> don't really help at all. Having multiple versions of structs really
> scares me. ;)
> 
> We already pad structs to allow for additional struct members to be
> added, which helps a lot.
> 
> If versioning of function symbols would be an issue we probably would
> have switched to ELF function versioning (like glibc does it) long time ago.
> 
> >> I think it is important to keep versioning information outside of the
> >> source code. Some kind of modversions will still be required, but
> >> distros should be able to decide if they put in some kind of checksum or
> >> a string, what suites them most.  
> > 
> > The module crc symbols are just an integer that requires a match, so it
> > could easily be populated by a list that the distro keeps, rather than
> > by genksyms. Most of the complexity is on the build side, so that would
> > still be an improvement for the kernel. So we *could* do this if the
> > distros need it.  
> 
> Like Don also already said, genksyms already did a pretty good job so
> far. We are right now working with Dodji to come up with a way to
> replace genksyms, in case people really want to have very specific
> control about what causes the symbol version to be changed.

Yeah it's great work, so is Stanislav's checker. I wouldn't mind having
a kernel-centric checker tool merged in the kernel if it is small,
maintained, and does a sufficient job for distros.

> Also I wonder what Ben's opinion on this is.. As I understood that he
> wants to maintain a super-long-term stable kernel with kabi guarantees.
> 
> Note, what we want is to weaken the check for kabi, by excluding parts
> of the struct from genksyms with libabigail. For Red Hat genksyms is too
> strict in the checks.

Sure, that makes sense.

So if I understand where we are, moving the ABI compatibility checking
to one of these tools looks possible. What to do when we have an ABI change
is not settled, but feeding version numbers explicitly into modversions
is an option that would be close to what distros do today.

Thanks,
Nick
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Hannes Frederic Sowa Dec. 15, 2016, 1:15 p.m. UTC | #51
On 15.12.2016 13:03, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Dec 2016 12:19:02 +0100
> Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 15.12.2016 03:06, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
>>> On Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:04:36 +0100
>>> Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>   
>>>> On 09.12.2016 17:03, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:  
>>>>> On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 01:56:53AM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:    
>>>>>> On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 15:36:04 +0100
>>>>>> Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>>>>    
>>>>>>>>>>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?      
>>>>>>>>>> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
>>>>>>>>>> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
>>>>>>>>>> superior (not that I've tested them).      
>>>>>>>>> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
>>>>>>>>> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
>>>>>>>>> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
>>>>>>>>> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
>>>>>>>>> module load.
>>>>>>>>> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
>>>>>>>>> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.      
>>>>>>>> A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
>>>>>>>> can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
>>>>>>>> have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?      
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>  From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some 
>>>>>>> modules while maintaining it for others.
>>>>>>> In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported 
>>>>>>> symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type 
>>>>>>> (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).    
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
>>>>>> or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?    
>>>>>
>>>>> There are other ways that distros can work around when upstream "breaks"
>>>>> the ABI, sometimes they can rename functions, and others they can
>>>>> "preload" structures with padding in anticipation for when/if fields get
>>>>> added to them.  But that's all up to the distros, no need for us to
>>>>> worry about that at all :)    
>>>>
>>>> The _v2 and _v3 functions are probably the ones that also get used by
>>>> future backports in the distro kernel itself and are probably the reason
>>>> for the ABI change in the first place. Thus going down this route will
>>>> basically require distros to touch every future backport patch and will
>>>> in general generate a big mess internally.  
>>>
>>> What kind of big mess? You have to check the logic of each backport even
>>> if it does apply cleanly, so the added overhead of the name change should
>>> be relatively tiny, no?  
>>
>> Basically single patches are backported in huge series. Reviewing each
>> single patch also definitely makes sense, a review of the series as a
>> whole is much more worthwhile because it focuses more on logic.
>>
>> The patches themselves are checked by individual robots or humans
>> against merge conflict introduced mistakes which ring alarm bells for
>> people to look more closely during review.
>>
>> Merge conflicts introduced mistakes definitely can happen because
>> developers/backporters lose the focus from the actual logic but deal
>> with shifting lines around or just fixing up postfixes to function names.
>>
>> We still try to align the kernel as much as possible with upstream,
>> because most developers can't really hold the differences between
>> upstream and the internal functions in their heads (is this function RMW
>> safe in this version but not that kernel version...).
> 
> I agree with all this, but in the case of a function rename, you can
> automate it all with scripts if that's what you want.
> 
> When you have your list of exported symbols with non-zero version number,
> then you can script that __abivXXX into the changeset applying process,
> or alternatively apply the rename after your patches are applied, or
> use the c preprocessor to define names to something else.

Yes, probably one could come up with coccinelle patches to do this,
preprocessing/string matching could have false positives. But as I wrote
above, we need one stable ABI and not multiple for our particular
kernels, so it seems like a lot of overhead to rename particular
functions internally all the time to make them inaccessible for external
modules.

>> Anyway, I don't think we will at any time have multiple versions of a
>> function exported to 3rd party kernel modules. The headaches are just
>> too big. Basically we would have to version structs and not functions
>> (this is our bigger problem), thus exporting new versions of functions
>> don't really help at all. Having multiple versions of structs really
>> scares me. ;)
>>
>> We already pad structs to allow for additional struct members to be
>> added, which helps a lot.
>>
>> If versioning of function symbols would be an issue we probably would
>> have switched to ELF function versioning (like glibc does it) long time ago.
>>
>>>> I think it is important to keep versioning information outside of the
>>>> source code. Some kind of modversions will still be required, but
>>>> distros should be able to decide if they put in some kind of checksum or
>>>> a string, what suites them most.  
>>>
>>> The module crc symbols are just an integer that requires a match, so it
>>> could easily be populated by a list that the distro keeps, rather than
>>> by genksyms. Most of the complexity is on the build side, so that would
>>> still be an improvement for the kernel. So we *could* do this if the
>>> distros need it.  
>>
>> Like Don also already said, genksyms already did a pretty good job so
>> far. We are right now working with Dodji to come up with a way to
>> replace genksyms, in case people really want to have very specific
>> control about what causes the symbol version to be changed.
> 
> Yeah it's great work, so is Stanislav's checker. I wouldn't mind having
> a kernel-centric checker tool merged in the kernel if it is small,
> maintained, and does a sufficient job for distros.

Yes, I think this needs more experimentation and thought right now
before we can make a decision.

>> Also I wonder what Ben's opinion on this is.. As I understood that he
>> wants to maintain a super-long-term stable kernel with kabi guarantees.
>>
>> Note, what we want is to weaken the check for kabi, by excluding parts
>> of the struct from genksyms with libabigail. For Red Hat genksyms is too
>> strict in the checks.
> 
> Sure, that makes sense.
> 
> So if I understand where we are, moving the ABI compatibility checking
> to one of these tools looks possible. What to do when we have an ABI change
> is not settled, but feeding version numbers explicitly into modversions
> is an option that would be close to what distros do today.

Agreed!

Thanks also,
Hannes

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Stanislav Kozina Dec. 15, 2016, 1:35 p.m. UTC | #52
> Yeah it's great work, so is Stanislav's checker. I wouldn't mind having
> a kernel-centric checker tool merged in the kernel if it is small,
> maintained, and does a sufficient job for distros.

I'd be very happy to see the resulting tool in the kernel tree, as it 
needs to be kept in sync with any significant changes done to the kernel 
layout in the future.
It's not important if the result is based off libabigail or kabi-dw 
code, I'm sure both can be adjusted to serve the needs. kabi-dw tends to 
be smaller and still rather proof-of-concept, libabigail is definitely 
more mature. The only real difference is C vs. C++ code.

> So if I understand where we are, moving the ABI compatibility checking
> to one of these tools looks possible. What to do when we have an ABI change
> is not settled, but feeding version numbers explicitly into modversions
> is an option that would be close to what distros do today.

Sounds great!

Thank you!
-Stanislav
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Nicholas Piggin Dec. 15, 2016, 2:15 p.m. UTC | #53
On Thu, 15 Dec 2016 14:15:31 +0100
Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 15.12.2016 13:03, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 Dec 2016 12:19:02 +0100
> > Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> On 15.12.2016 03:06, Nicholas Piggin wrote:  
> >>> On Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:04:36 +0100
> >>> Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:
> >>>     
> >>>> On 09.12.2016 17:03, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:    
> >>>>> On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 01:56:53AM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:      
> >>>>>> On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 15:36:04 +0100
> >>>>>> Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
> >>>>>>      
> >>>>>>>>>>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?        
> >>>>>>>>>> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
> >>>>>>>>>> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
> >>>>>>>>>> superior (not that I've tested them).        
> >>>>>>>>> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
> >>>>>>>>> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
> >>>>>>>>> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
> >>>>>>>>> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
> >>>>>>>>> module load.
> >>>>>>>>> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
> >>>>>>>>> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.        
> >>>>>>>> A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
> >>>>>>>> can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
> >>>>>>>> have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?        
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>  From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some 
> >>>>>>> modules while maintaining it for others.
> >>>>>>> In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported 
> >>>>>>> symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type 
> >>>>>>> (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).      
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
> >>>>>> or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?      
> >>>>>
> >>>>> There are other ways that distros can work around when upstream "breaks"
> >>>>> the ABI, sometimes they can rename functions, and others they can
> >>>>> "preload" structures with padding in anticipation for when/if fields get
> >>>>> added to them.  But that's all up to the distros, no need for us to
> >>>>> worry about that at all :)      
> >>>>
> >>>> The _v2 and _v3 functions are probably the ones that also get used by
> >>>> future backports in the distro kernel itself and are probably the reason
> >>>> for the ABI change in the first place. Thus going down this route will
> >>>> basically require distros to touch every future backport patch and will
> >>>> in general generate a big mess internally.    
> >>>
> >>> What kind of big mess? You have to check the logic of each backport even
> >>> if it does apply cleanly, so the added overhead of the name change should
> >>> be relatively tiny, no?    
> >>
> >> Basically single patches are backported in huge series. Reviewing each
> >> single patch also definitely makes sense, a review of the series as a
> >> whole is much more worthwhile because it focuses more on logic.
> >>
> >> The patches themselves are checked by individual robots or humans
> >> against merge conflict introduced mistakes which ring alarm bells for
> >> people to look more closely during review.
> >>
> >> Merge conflicts introduced mistakes definitely can happen because
> >> developers/backporters lose the focus from the actual logic but deal
> >> with shifting lines around or just fixing up postfixes to function names.
> >>
> >> We still try to align the kernel as much as possible with upstream,
> >> because most developers can't really hold the differences between
> >> upstream and the internal functions in their heads (is this function RMW
> >> safe in this version but not that kernel version...).  
> > 
> > I agree with all this, but in the case of a function rename, you can
> > automate it all with scripts if that's what you want.
> > 
> > When you have your list of exported symbols with non-zero version number,
> > then you can script that __abivXXX into the changeset applying process,
> > or alternatively apply the rename after your patches are applied, or
> > use the c preprocessor to define names to something else.  
> 
> Yes, probably one could come up with coccinelle patches to do this,
> preprocessing/string matching could have false positives. But as I wrote
> above, we need one stable ABI and not multiple for our particular
> kernels, so it seems like a lot of overhead to rename particular
> functions internally all the time to make them inaccessible for external
> modules.

I can't be sure until it's implemented in a workflow that distros are
happy with of course, but I just don't see why it would be a lot of
overhead. Particularly if you just scripted everything.

How frequently do symbols become incompatible within an ostensibly ABI-
stable release?

> >> Like Don also already said, genksyms already did a pretty good job so
> >> far. We are right now working with Dodji to come up with a way to
> >> replace genksyms, in case people really want to have very specific
> >> control about what causes the symbol version to be changed.  
> > 
> > Yeah it's great work, so is Stanislav's checker. I wouldn't mind having
> > a kernel-centric checker tool merged in the kernel if it is small,
> > maintained, and does a sufficient job for distros.  
> 
> Yes, I think this needs more experimentation and thought right now
> before we can make a decision.

Sure, I wanted to mention it in case people had a concern about out
of tree tools. It will depend on what distros end up settling with.

> >> Also I wonder what Ben's opinion on this is.. As I understood that he
> >> wants to maintain a super-long-term stable kernel with kabi guarantees.
> >>
> >> Note, what we want is to weaken the check for kabi, by excluding parts
> >> of the struct from genksyms with libabigail. For Red Hat genksyms is too
> >> strict in the checks.  
> > 
> > Sure, that makes sense.
> > 
> > So if I understand where we are, moving the ABI compatibility checking
> > to one of these tools looks possible. What to do when we have an ABI change
> > is not settled, but feeding version numbers explicitly into modversions
> > is an option that would be close to what distros do today.  
> 
> Agreed!

Thanks,
Nick
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Hannes Frederic Sowa Dec. 15, 2016, 3:17 p.m. UTC | #54
On 15.12.2016 15:15, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Dec 2016 14:15:31 +0100
> Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 15.12.2016 13:03, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
>>> On Thu, 15 Dec 2016 12:19:02 +0100
>>> Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>   
>>>> On 15.12.2016 03:06, Nicholas Piggin wrote:  
>>>>> On Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:04:36 +0100
>>>>> Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>>>     
>>>>>> On 09.12.2016 17:03, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:    
>>>>>>> On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 01:56:53AM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:      
>>>>>>>> On Fri, 9 Dec 2016 15:36:04 +0100
>>>>>>>> Stanislav Kozina <skozina@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>      
>>>>>>>>>>>>> The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?        
>>>>>>>>>>>> As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
>>>>>>>>>>>> debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
>>>>>>>>>>>> superior (not that I've tested them).        
>>>>>>>>>>> On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
>>>>>>>>>>> verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
>>>>>>>>>>> believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
>>>>>>>>>>> checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
>>>>>>>>>>> module load.
>>>>>>>>>>> It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
>>>>>>>>>>> parse DWARF data instead of the C code.        
>>>>>>>>>> A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
>>>>>>>>>> can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
>>>>>>>>>> have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?        
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>  From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some 
>>>>>>>>> modules while maintaining it for others.
>>>>>>>>> In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported 
>>>>>>>>> symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type 
>>>>>>>>> (in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).      
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Well the distro can just append _v2, _v3 to the name of the function
>>>>>>>> or type if it has to break compat for some reason. Would that be enough?      
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There are other ways that distros can work around when upstream "breaks"
>>>>>>> the ABI, sometimes they can rename functions, and others they can
>>>>>>> "preload" structures with padding in anticipation for when/if fields get
>>>>>>> added to them.  But that's all up to the distros, no need for us to
>>>>>>> worry about that at all :)      
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The _v2 and _v3 functions are probably the ones that also get used by
>>>>>> future backports in the distro kernel itself and are probably the reason
>>>>>> for the ABI change in the first place. Thus going down this route will
>>>>>> basically require distros to touch every future backport patch and will
>>>>>> in general generate a big mess internally.    
>>>>>
>>>>> What kind of big mess? You have to check the logic of each backport even
>>>>> if it does apply cleanly, so the added overhead of the name change should
>>>>> be relatively tiny, no?    
>>>>
>>>> Basically single patches are backported in huge series. Reviewing each
>>>> single patch also definitely makes sense, a review of the series as a
>>>> whole is much more worthwhile because it focuses more on logic.
>>>>
>>>> The patches themselves are checked by individual robots or humans
>>>> against merge conflict introduced mistakes which ring alarm bells for
>>>> people to look more closely during review.
>>>>
>>>> Merge conflicts introduced mistakes definitely can happen because
>>>> developers/backporters lose the focus from the actual logic but deal
>>>> with shifting lines around or just fixing up postfixes to function names.
>>>>
>>>> We still try to align the kernel as much as possible with upstream,
>>>> because most developers can't really hold the differences between
>>>> upstream and the internal functions in their heads (is this function RMW
>>>> safe in this version but not that kernel version...).  
>>>
>>> I agree with all this, but in the case of a function rename, you can
>>> automate it all with scripts if that's what you want.
>>>
>>> When you have your list of exported symbols with non-zero version number,
>>> then you can script that __abivXXX into the changeset applying process,
>>> or alternatively apply the rename after your patches are applied, or
>>> use the c preprocessor to define names to something else.  
>>
>> Yes, probably one could come up with coccinelle patches to do this,
>> preprocessing/string matching could have false positives. But as I wrote
>> above, we need one stable ABI and not multiple for our particular
>> kernels, so it seems like a lot of overhead to rename particular
>> functions internally all the time to make them inaccessible for external
>> modules.
> 
> I can't be sure until it's implemented in a workflow that distros are
> happy with of course, but I just don't see why it would be a lot of
> overhead. Particularly if you just scripted everything.

Yes, me neither, of course. I just would favor to get away with the
scripting if possible. ;)

> How frequently do symbols become incompatible within an ostensibly ABI-
> stable release?

Given how genksyms works right now, I would say quite frequently. I
would even go that far to say that every larger backport I had to deal
with in networking had those problems because of some very important top
level structs that make everything reachable (struct net_device or
struct sock), so each change to those structs basically cause a kabi change.

Even if we replace padding in a structure we added before a release,
this is actually considered a kabi breakage, we must annotate this
appropriately because of genksyms.

E.g. I also thought about reordering the structs. As already discussed
in this thread, genksyms takes ordering of its definition vs.
declarations into account, e.g.:

struct foo;
struct bar {
	struct foo *f;
};
<< private >>
struct foo {
};

wouldn't actually include struct foo as part of the symvers, but the
other way around it would.

Instead of burden upstream with this kind of reordering, a suppression
engine would be favored by me which we can drive by review and
discussions. Thus upstream doesn't have any burden on that, but it is
solely the burden of the distributions, where the burden belongs. ;)

>>>> Like Don also already said, genksyms already did a pretty good job so
>>>> far. We are right now working with Dodji to come up with a way to
>>>> replace genksyms, in case people really want to have very specific
>>>> control about what causes the symbol version to be changed.  
>>>
>>> Yeah it's great work, so is Stanislav's checker. I wouldn't mind having
>>> a kernel-centric checker tool merged in the kernel if it is small,
>>> maintained, and does a sufficient job for distros.  
>>
>> Yes, I think this needs more experimentation and thought right now
>> before we can make a decision.
> 
> Sure, I wanted to mention it in case people had a concern about out
> of tree tools. It will depend on what distros end up settling with.

The possibilities I see right now:

* we leave genksyms where it is for the time being and add a KCONFIG
knob to be able to call a replacement tool with well formed command line
syntax and stdout semantics.

* we import one of the alternatives instead of genksyms if it fits to
the kernel. I am still a bit concerned about differences in dwarf vs.
source code parsing. In the past I had twice bugs in dwarf generation,
but this probably can be dealt with, but just needs a bit more
experience in my opinion.

* we remove genksyms and just use one versioning vector for upstream but
still allow some kind of modversions per symbol being loaded from a
third party program like kabi-dw or libabigail.

Personally, because I see genksyms working quite well right now, I would
stick to it until we (the distributions) came to a conclusion.

Bye,
Hannes

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diff mbox

Patch

diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index c2ed4ec..cde8773 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -20,7 +20,6 @@ 
 *.mod.c
 *.i
 *.lst
-*.symtypes
 *.order
 *.elf
 *.bin
diff --git a/Documentation/dontdiff b/Documentation/dontdiff
index 5385cba..40eb3e0 100644
--- a/Documentation/dontdiff
+++ b/Documentation/dontdiff
@@ -47,7 +47,6 @@ 
 *.sgml
 *.so
 *.so.dbg
-*.symtypes
 *.tab.c
 *.tab.h
 *.tex
@@ -180,7 +179,6 @@  mktree
 modpost
 modules.builtin
 modules.order
-modversions.h*
 nconf
 ncscope.*
 offset.h
diff --git a/Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt b/Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt
index 3fb39e0..1568b8a 100644
--- a/Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt
@@ -61,10 +61,6 @@  make sure the kernel contains the information required. The target
 exists solely as a simple way to prepare a kernel source tree for
 building external modules.
 
-NOTE: "modules_prepare" will not build Module.symvers even if
-CONFIG_MODVERSIONS is set; therefore, a full kernel build needs to be
-executed to make module versioning work.
-
 --- 2.1 Command Syntax
 
 	The command to build an external module is:
diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index 694111b..2066419 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -316,13 +316,6 @@  KBUILD_MODULES :=
 KBUILD_BUILTIN := 1
 
 # If we have only "make modules", don't compile built-in objects.
-# When we're building modules with modversions, we need to consider
-# the built-in objects during the descend as well, in order to
-# make sure the checksums are up to date before we record them.
-
-ifeq ($(MAKECMDGOALS),modules)
-  KBUILD_BUILTIN := $(if $(CONFIG_MODVERSIONS),1)
-endif
 
 # If we have "make <whatever> modules", compile modules
 # in addition to whatever we do anyway.
diff --git a/arch/arm64/include/asm/module.h b/arch/arm64/include/asm/module.h
index 06ff7fd..253f6ca 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/include/asm/module.h
+++ b/arch/arm64/include/asm/module.h
@@ -33,10 +33,6 @@  u64 module_emit_plt_entry(struct module *mod, const Elf64_Rela *rela,
 			  Elf64_Sym *sym);
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_RANDOMIZE_BASE
-#ifdef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
-#define ARCH_RELOCATES_KCRCTAB
-#define reloc_start 		(kimage_vaddr - KIMAGE_VADDR)
-#endif
 extern u64 module_alloc_base;
 #else
 #define module_alloc_base	((u64)_etext - MODULES_VSIZE)
diff --git a/arch/avr32/boot/images/Makefile b/arch/avr32/boot/images/Makefile
index 2a3b539..0878bef 100644
--- a/arch/avr32/boot/images/Makefile
+++ b/arch/avr32/boot/images/Makefile
@@ -37,8 +37,6 @@  OBJCOPYFLAGS_vmlinux.elf := --change-section-lma .text-0x80000000 \
 			    --change-section-lma __param-0x80000000 \
 			    --change-section-lma __ksymtab-0x80000000 \
 			    --change-section-lma __ksymtab_gpl-0x80000000 \
-			    --change-section-lma __kcrctab-0x80000000 \
-			    --change-section-lma __kcrctab_gpl-0x80000000 \
 			    --change-section-lma __ksymtab_strings-0x80000000 \
 			    --set-start 0xa0000000
 $(obj)/vmlinux.elf: vmlinux FORCE
diff --git a/arch/powerpc/include/asm/module.h b/arch/powerpc/include/asm/module.h
index cd4ffd8..94a7f7a 100644
--- a/arch/powerpc/include/asm/module.h
+++ b/arch/powerpc/include/asm/module.h
@@ -94,9 +94,5 @@  struct exception_table_entry;
 void sort_ex_table(struct exception_table_entry *start,
 		   struct exception_table_entry *finish);
 
-#if defined(CONFIG_MODVERSIONS) && defined(CONFIG_PPC64)
-#define ARCH_RELOCATES_KCRCTAB
-#define reloc_start PHYSICAL_START
-#endif
 #endif /* __KERNEL__ */
 #endif	/* _ASM_POWERPC_MODULE_H */
diff --git a/arch/powerpc/kernel/module_64.c b/arch/powerpc/kernel/module_64.c
index 183368e..3e59856 100644
--- a/arch/powerpc/kernel/module_64.c
+++ b/arch/powerpc/kernel/module_64.c
@@ -277,30 +277,11 @@  static unsigned long get_stubs_size(const Elf64_Ehdr *hdr,
 	return relocs * sizeof(struct ppc64_stub_entry);
 }
 
-/* Still needed for ELFv2, for .TOC. */
-static void dedotify_versions(struct modversion_info *vers,
-			      unsigned long size)
-{
-	struct modversion_info *end;
-
-	for (end = (void *)vers + size; vers < end; vers++)
-		if (vers->name[0] == '.') {
-			memmove(vers->name, vers->name+1, strlen(vers->name));
-#ifdef ARCH_RELOCATES_KCRCTAB
-			/* The TOC symbol has no CRC computed. To avoid CRC
-			 * check failing, we must force it to the expected
-			 * value (see CRC check in module.c).
-			 */
-			if (!strcmp(vers->name, "TOC."))
-				vers->crc = -(unsigned long)reloc_start;
-#endif
-		}
-}
-
 /*
  * Undefined symbols which refer to .funcname, hack to funcname. Make .TOC.
  * seem to be defined (value set later).
  */
+/* XXX: remove for ELFv2? */
 static void dedotify(Elf64_Sym *syms, unsigned int numsyms, char *strtab)
 {
 	unsigned int i;
@@ -349,9 +330,6 @@  int module_frob_arch_sections(Elf64_Ehdr *hdr,
 			me->arch.stubs_section = i;
 		else if (strcmp(secstrings + sechdrs[i].sh_name, ".toc") == 0)
 			me->arch.toc_section = i;
-		else if (strcmp(secstrings+sechdrs[i].sh_name,"__versions")==0)
-			dedotify_versions((void *)hdr + sechdrs[i].sh_offset,
-					  sechdrs[i].sh_size);
 
 		/* We don't handle .init for the moment: rename to _init */
 		while ((p = strstr(secstrings + sechdrs[i].sh_name, ".init")))
diff --git a/arch/x86/tools/relocs.c b/arch/x86/tools/relocs.c
index 0c2fae8..4c15dc0 100644
--- a/arch/x86/tools/relocs.c
+++ b/arch/x86/tools/relocs.c
@@ -59,7 +59,6 @@  static const char * const sym_regex_kernel[S_NSYMTYPES] = {
 	"__(start|end)_pci_.*|"
 	"__(start|end)_builtin_fw|"
 	"__(start|stop)___ksymtab(|_gpl|_unused|_unused_gpl|_gpl_future)|"
-	"__(start|stop)___kcrctab(|_gpl|_unused|_unused_gpl|_gpl_future)|"
 	"__(start|stop)___param|"
 	"__(start|stop)___modver|"
 	"__(start|stop)___bug_table|"
diff --git a/drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_ssif.c b/drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_ssif.c
index 5673fff..89c3ece 100644
--- a/drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_ssif.c
+++ b/drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_ssif.c
@@ -30,11 +30,6 @@ 
  * TODO: Figure out how to use SMB alerts.  This will require a new
  * interface into the I2C driver, I believe.
  */
-
-#if defined(MODVERSIONS)
-#include <linux/modversions.h>
-#endif
-
 #include <linux/module.h>
 #include <linux/moduleparam.h>
 #include <linux/sched.h>
diff --git a/drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile b/drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile
index 5e23e2d..0d9d84e 100644
--- a/drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile
+++ b/drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile
@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@  CFLAGS_arm64-stub.o 		:= -DTEXT_OFFSET=$(TEXT_OFFSET)
 extra-$(CONFIG_EFI_ARMSTUB)	:= $(lib-y)
 lib-$(CONFIG_EFI_ARMSTUB)	:= $(patsubst %.o,%.stub.o,$(lib-y))
 
-STUBCOPY_FLAGS-y		:= -R .debug* -R *ksymtab* -R *kcrctab*
+STUBCOPY_FLAGS-y		:= -R .debug* -R *ksymtab*
 STUBCOPY_FLAGS-$(CONFIG_ARM64)	+= --prefix-alloc-sections=.init \
 				   --prefix-symbols=__efistub_
 STUBCOPY_RELOC-$(CONFIG_ARM64)	:= R_AARCH64_ABS
@@ -80,5 +80,5 @@  quiet_cmd_stubcopy = STUBCPY $@
 # explicitly by the decompressor linker script.
 #
 STUBCOPY_FLAGS-$(CONFIG_ARM)	+= --rename-section .data=.data.efistub \
-				   -R ___ksymtab+sort -R ___kcrctab+sort
+				   -R ___ksymtab+sort
 STUBCOPY_RELOC-$(CONFIG_ARM)	:= R_ARM_ABS
diff --git a/drivers/message/fusion/mptlan.h b/drivers/message/fusion/mptlan.h
index 69e9d54..f976a5b 100644
--- a/drivers/message/fusion/mptlan.h
+++ b/drivers/message/fusion/mptlan.h
@@ -51,10 +51,7 @@ 
 #define LINUX_MPTLAN_H_INCLUDED
 /*****************************************************************************/
 
-#if !defined(__GENKSYMS__)
 #include <linux/module.h>
-#endif
-
 #include <linux/netdevice.h>
 #include <linux/errno.h>
 // #include <linux/etherdevice.h>
diff --git a/include/asm-generic/export.h b/include/asm-generic/export.h
index 63554e9..cb0c6cf 100644
--- a/include/asm-generic/export.h
+++ b/include/asm-generic/export.h
@@ -48,14 +48,6 @@  KSYM(__kstrtab_\name):
 	.asciz "\name"
 #endif
 	.previous
-#ifdef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
-	.section ___kcrctab\sec+\name,"a"
-	.balign KCRC_ALIGN
-KSYM(__kcrctab_\name):
-	__put KSYM(__crc_\name)
-	.weak KSYM(__crc_\name)
-	.previous
-#endif
 #endif
 .endm
 #undef __put
diff --git a/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h b/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h
index 6d5d35f..8b52b57 100644
--- a/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h
+++ b/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h
@@ -360,41 +360,6 @@ 
 		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__stop___ksymtab_gpl_future) = .;	\
 	}								\
 									\
-	/* Kernel symbol table: Normal symbols */			\
-	__kcrctab         : AT(ADDR(__kcrctab) - LOAD_OFFSET) {		\
-		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__start___kcrctab) = .;			\
-		KEEP(*(SORT(___kcrctab+*)))				\
-		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__stop___kcrctab) = .;			\
-	}								\
-									\
-	/* Kernel symbol table: GPL-only symbols */			\
-	__kcrctab_gpl     : AT(ADDR(__kcrctab_gpl) - LOAD_OFFSET) {	\
-		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__start___kcrctab_gpl) = .;		\
-		KEEP(*(SORT(___kcrctab_gpl+*)))				\
-		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__stop___kcrctab_gpl) = .;		\
-	}								\
-									\
-	/* Kernel symbol table: Normal unused symbols */		\
-	__kcrctab_unused  : AT(ADDR(__kcrctab_unused) - LOAD_OFFSET) {	\
-		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__start___kcrctab_unused) = .;		\
-		KEEP(*(SORT(___kcrctab_unused+*)))			\
-		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__stop___kcrctab_unused) = .;		\
-	}								\
-									\
-	/* Kernel symbol table: GPL-only unused symbols */		\
-	__kcrctab_unused_gpl : AT(ADDR(__kcrctab_unused_gpl) - LOAD_OFFSET) { \
-		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__start___kcrctab_unused_gpl) = .;	\
-		KEEP(*(SORT(___kcrctab_unused_gpl+*)))			\
-		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__stop___kcrctab_unused_gpl) = .;	\
-	}								\
-									\
-	/* Kernel symbol table: GPL-future-only symbols */		\
-	__kcrctab_gpl_future : AT(ADDR(__kcrctab_gpl_future) - LOAD_OFFSET) { \
-		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__start___kcrctab_gpl_future) = .;	\
-		KEEP(*(SORT(___kcrctab_gpl_future+*)))			\
-		VMLINUX_SYMBOL(__stop___kcrctab_gpl_future) = .;	\
-	}								\
-									\
 	/* Kernel symbol table: strings */				\
         __ksymtab_strings : AT(ADDR(__ksymtab_strings) - LOAD_OFFSET) {	\
 		KEEP(*(__ksymtab_strings))				\
diff --git a/include/linux/export.h b/include/linux/export.h
index 2a0f61f..ba359cf 100644
--- a/include/linux/export.h
+++ b/include/linux/export.h
@@ -39,24 +39,11 @@  extern struct module __this_module;
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_MODULES
 
-#if defined(__KERNEL__) && !defined(__GENKSYMS__)
-#ifdef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
-/* Mark the CRC weak since genksyms apparently decides not to
- * generate a checksums for some symbols */
-#define __CRC_SYMBOL(sym, sec)						\
-	extern __visible void *__crc_##sym __attribute__((weak));	\
-	static const unsigned long __kcrctab_##sym			\
-	__used								\
-	__attribute__((section("___kcrctab" sec "+" #sym), used))	\
-	= (unsigned long) &__crc_##sym;
-#else
-#define __CRC_SYMBOL(sym, sec)
-#endif
+#if defined(__KERNEL__)
 
 /* For every exported symbol, place a struct in the __ksymtab section */
 #define ___EXPORT_SYMBOL(sym, sec)					\
 	extern typeof(sym) sym;						\
-	__CRC_SYMBOL(sym, sec)						\
 	static const char __kstrtab_##sym[]				\
 	__attribute__((section("__ksymtab_strings"), aligned(1)))	\
 	= VMLINUX_SYMBOL_STR(sym);					\
@@ -110,7 +97,7 @@  extern struct module __this_module;
 #define EXPORT_UNUSED_SYMBOL_GPL(sym)
 #endif
 
-#endif	/* __GENKSYMS__ */
+#endif	/* __KERNEL__ */
 
 #else /* !CONFIG_MODULES... */
 
diff --git a/include/linux/module.h b/include/linux/module.h
index 0c3207d..ee121f2 100644
--- a/include/linux/module.h
+++ b/include/linux/module.h
@@ -32,11 +32,6 @@ 
 
 #define MODULE_NAME_LEN MAX_PARAM_PREFIX_LEN
 
-struct modversion_info {
-	unsigned long crc;
-	char name[MODULE_NAME_LEN];
-};
-
 struct module;
 struct exception_table_entry;
 
@@ -346,7 +341,6 @@  struct module {
 
 	/* Exported symbols */
 	const struct kernel_symbol *syms;
-	const unsigned long *crcs;
 	unsigned int num_syms;
 
 	/* Kernel parameters. */
@@ -359,18 +353,15 @@  struct module {
 	/* GPL-only exported symbols. */
 	unsigned int num_gpl_syms;
 	const struct kernel_symbol *gpl_syms;
-	const unsigned long *gpl_crcs;
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_UNUSED_SYMBOLS
 	/* unused exported symbols. */
 	const struct kernel_symbol *unused_syms;
-	const unsigned long *unused_crcs;
 	unsigned int num_unused_syms;
 
 	/* GPL-only, unused exported symbols. */
 	unsigned int num_unused_gpl_syms;
 	const struct kernel_symbol *unused_gpl_syms;
-	const unsigned long *unused_gpl_crcs;
 #endif
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_MODULE_SIG
@@ -382,7 +373,6 @@  struct module {
 
 	/* symbols that will be GPL-only in the near future. */
 	const struct kernel_symbol *gpl_future_syms;
-	const unsigned long *gpl_future_crcs;
 	unsigned int num_gpl_future_syms;
 
 	/* Exception table */
@@ -523,7 +513,6 @@  struct module *find_module(const char *name);
 
 struct symsearch {
 	const struct kernel_symbol *start, *stop;
-	const unsigned long *crcs;
 	enum {
 		NOT_GPL_ONLY,
 		GPL_ONLY,
@@ -539,7 +528,6 @@  struct symsearch {
  */
 const struct kernel_symbol *find_symbol(const char *name,
 					struct module **owner,
-					const unsigned long **crc,
 					bool gplok,
 					bool warn);
 
diff --git a/include/linux/vermagic.h b/include/linux/vermagic.h
index 6f8fbcf..fafeea0 100644
--- a/include/linux/vermagic.h
+++ b/include/linux/vermagic.h
@@ -16,18 +16,16 @@ 
 #else
 #define MODULE_VERMAGIC_MODULE_UNLOAD ""
 #endif
-#ifdef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
-#define MODULE_VERMAGIC_MODVERSIONS "modversions "
-#else
-#define MODULE_VERMAGIC_MODVERSIONS ""
-#endif
 #ifndef MODULE_ARCH_VERMAGIC
 #define MODULE_ARCH_VERMAGIC ""
 #endif
 
+#ifdef CONFIG_MODULE_ABI_EXPLICIT
+#define VERMAGIC_STRING CONFIG_MODULE_ABI_EXPLICIT_STRING
+#else
 #define VERMAGIC_STRING 						\
 	UTS_RELEASE " "							\
 	MODULE_VERMAGIC_SMP MODULE_VERMAGIC_PREEMPT 			\
-	MODULE_VERMAGIC_MODULE_UNLOAD MODULE_VERMAGIC_MODVERSIONS	\
+	MODULE_VERMAGIC_MODULE_UNLOAD					\
 	MODULE_ARCH_VERMAGIC
-
+#endif
diff --git a/init/Kconfig b/init/Kconfig
index 34407f1..7a1b6ac 100644
--- a/init/Kconfig
+++ b/init/Kconfig
@@ -1943,15 +1943,25 @@  config MODULE_FORCE_UNLOAD
 	  rmmod).  This is mainly for kernel developers and desperate users.
 	  If unsure, say N.
 
-config MODVERSIONS
-	bool "Module versioning support"
-	help
-	  Usually, you have to use modules compiled with your kernel.
-	  Saying Y here makes it sometimes possible to use modules
-	  compiled for different kernels, by adding enough information
-	  to the modules to (hopefully) spot any changes which would
-	  make them incompatible with the kernel you are running.  If
-	  unsure, say N.
+config MODULE_ABI_EXPLICIT
+	bool "Provide explicit module ABI version string" if EXPERT
+	default n
+	help
+	  This option is mostly for distro maintainers.
+
+	  When this option is NOT set, the kernel/module ABI version string
+	  is based on the kernel version (among other things), which means
+	  modules are not compatible when there is any change to kernel
+	  version. This is what most people want.
+
+	  Enabling this option allows you to provide an explicit module
+	  ABI version string. This allows modules to be usable between kernel
+	  version bumps.
+
+	  If unusure, say N.
+
+config MODULE_ABI_EXPLICIT_STRING
+	string "Explicit module ABI version string" if MODULE_ABI_EXPLICIT
 
 config MODULE_SRCVERSION_ALL
 	bool "Source checksum for all modules"
diff --git a/kernel/module.c b/kernel/module.c
index 0e54d5b..ff68854 100644
--- a/kernel/module.c
+++ b/kernel/module.c
@@ -309,7 +309,7 @@  struct load_info {
 	unsigned long mod_kallsyms_init_off;
 #endif
 	struct {
-		unsigned int sym, str, mod, vers, info, pcpu;
+		unsigned int sym, str, mod, info, pcpu;
 	} index;
 };
 
@@ -386,22 +386,11 @@  extern const struct kernel_symbol __start___ksymtab_gpl[];
 extern const struct kernel_symbol __stop___ksymtab_gpl[];
 extern const struct kernel_symbol __start___ksymtab_gpl_future[];
 extern const struct kernel_symbol __stop___ksymtab_gpl_future[];
-extern const unsigned long __start___kcrctab[];
-extern const unsigned long __start___kcrctab_gpl[];
-extern const unsigned long __start___kcrctab_gpl_future[];
 #ifdef CONFIG_UNUSED_SYMBOLS
 extern const struct kernel_symbol __start___ksymtab_unused[];
 extern const struct kernel_symbol __stop___ksymtab_unused[];
 extern const struct kernel_symbol __start___ksymtab_unused_gpl[];
 extern const struct kernel_symbol __stop___ksymtab_unused_gpl[];
-extern const unsigned long __start___kcrctab_unused[];
-extern const unsigned long __start___kcrctab_unused_gpl[];
-#endif
-
-#ifndef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
-#define symversion(base, idx) NULL
-#else
-#define symversion(base, idx) ((base != NULL) ? ((base) + (idx)) : NULL)
 #endif
 
 static bool each_symbol_in_section(const struct symsearch *arr,
@@ -430,20 +419,16 @@  bool each_symbol_section(bool (*fn)(const struct symsearch *arr,
 {
 	struct module *mod;
 	static const struct symsearch arr[] = {
-		{ __start___ksymtab, __stop___ksymtab, __start___kcrctab,
+		{ __start___ksymtab, __stop___ksymtab,
 		  NOT_GPL_ONLY, false },
 		{ __start___ksymtab_gpl, __stop___ksymtab_gpl,
-		  __start___kcrctab_gpl,
 		  GPL_ONLY, false },
 		{ __start___ksymtab_gpl_future, __stop___ksymtab_gpl_future,
-		  __start___kcrctab_gpl_future,
 		  WILL_BE_GPL_ONLY, false },
 #ifdef CONFIG_UNUSED_SYMBOLS
 		{ __start___ksymtab_unused, __stop___ksymtab_unused,
-		  __start___kcrctab_unused,
 		  NOT_GPL_ONLY, true },
 		{ __start___ksymtab_unused_gpl, __stop___ksymtab_unused_gpl,
-		  __start___kcrctab_unused_gpl,
 		  GPL_ONLY, true },
 #endif
 	};
@@ -455,23 +440,19 @@  bool each_symbol_section(bool (*fn)(const struct symsearch *arr,
 
 	list_for_each_entry_rcu(mod, &modules, list) {
 		struct symsearch arr[] = {
-			{ mod->syms, mod->syms + mod->num_syms, mod->crcs,
+			{ mod->syms, mod->syms + mod->num_syms,
 			  NOT_GPL_ONLY, false },
 			{ mod->gpl_syms, mod->gpl_syms + mod->num_gpl_syms,
-			  mod->gpl_crcs,
 			  GPL_ONLY, false },
 			{ mod->gpl_future_syms,
 			  mod->gpl_future_syms + mod->num_gpl_future_syms,
-			  mod->gpl_future_crcs,
 			  WILL_BE_GPL_ONLY, false },
 #ifdef CONFIG_UNUSED_SYMBOLS
 			{ mod->unused_syms,
 			  mod->unused_syms + mod->num_unused_syms,
-			  mod->unused_crcs,
 			  NOT_GPL_ONLY, true },
 			{ mod->unused_gpl_syms,
 			  mod->unused_gpl_syms + mod->num_unused_gpl_syms,
-			  mod->unused_gpl_crcs,
 			  GPL_ONLY, true },
 #endif
 		};
@@ -494,7 +475,6 @@  struct find_symbol_arg {
 
 	/* Output */
 	struct module *owner;
-	const unsigned long *crc;
 	const struct kernel_symbol *sym;
 };
 
@@ -527,7 +507,6 @@  static bool check_symbol(const struct symsearch *syms,
 #endif
 
 	fsa->owner = owner;
-	fsa->crc = symversion(syms->crcs, symnum);
 	fsa->sym = &syms->start[symnum];
 	return true;
 }
@@ -556,11 +535,12 @@  static bool find_symbol_in_section(const struct symsearch *syms,
 	return false;
 }
 
-/* Find a symbol and return it, along with, (optional) crc and
- * (optional) module which owns it.  Needs preempt disabled or module_mutex. */
+/*
+ * Find a symbol and return it, along with, and (optional) module which owns
+ * it.  Needs preempt disabled or module_mutex.
+ */
 const struct kernel_symbol *find_symbol(const char *name,
 					struct module **owner,
-					const unsigned long **crc,
 					bool gplok,
 					bool warn)
 {
@@ -573,8 +553,6 @@  const struct kernel_symbol *find_symbol(const char *name,
 	if (each_symbol_section(find_symbol_in_section, &fsa)) {
 		if (owner)
 			*owner = fsa.owner;
-		if (crc)
-			*crc = fsa.crc;
 		return fsa.sym;
 	}
 
@@ -1031,7 +1009,7 @@  void __symbol_put(const char *symbol)
 	struct module *owner;
 
 	preempt_disable();
-	if (!find_symbol(symbol, &owner, NULL, true, false))
+	if (!find_symbol(symbol, &owner, true, false))
 		BUG();
 	module_put(owner);
 	preempt_enable();
@@ -1256,118 +1234,6 @@  static int try_to_force_load(struct module *mod, const char *reason)
 #endif
 }
 
-#ifdef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
-/* If the arch applies (non-zero) relocations to kernel kcrctab, unapply it. */
-static unsigned long maybe_relocated(unsigned long crc,
-				     const struct module *crc_owner)
-{
-#ifdef ARCH_RELOCATES_KCRCTAB
-	if (crc_owner == NULL)
-		return crc - (unsigned long)reloc_start;
-#endif
-	return crc;
-}
-
-static int check_version(Elf_Shdr *sechdrs,
-			 unsigned int versindex,
-			 const char *symname,
-			 struct module *mod,
-			 const unsigned long *crc,
-			 const struct module *crc_owner)
-{
-	unsigned int i, num_versions;
-	struct modversion_info *versions;
-
-	/* Exporting module didn't supply crcs?  OK, we're already tainted. */
-	if (!crc)
-		return 1;
-
-	/* No versions at all?  modprobe --force does this. */
-	if (versindex == 0)
-		return try_to_force_load(mod, symname) == 0;
-
-	versions = (void *) sechdrs[versindex].sh_addr;
-	num_versions = sechdrs[versindex].sh_size
-		/ sizeof(struct modversion_info);
-
-	for (i = 0; i < num_versions; i++) {
-		if (strcmp(versions[i].name, symname) != 0)
-			continue;
-
-		if (versions[i].crc == maybe_relocated(*crc, crc_owner))
-			return 1;
-		pr_debug("Found checksum %lX vs module %lX\n",
-		       maybe_relocated(*crc, crc_owner), versions[i].crc);
-		goto bad_version;
-	}
-
-	/* Broken toolchain. Warn once, then let it go.. */
-	pr_warn_once("%s: no symbol version for %s\n", mod->name, symname);
-	return 1;
-
-bad_version:
-	pr_warn("%s: disagrees about version of symbol %s\n",
-	       mod->name, symname);
-	return 0;
-}
-
-static inline int check_modstruct_version(Elf_Shdr *sechdrs,
-					  unsigned int versindex,
-					  struct module *mod)
-{
-	const unsigned long *crc;
-
-	/*
-	 * Since this should be found in kernel (which can't be removed), no
-	 * locking is necessary -- use preempt_disable() to placate lockdep.
-	 */
-	preempt_disable();
-	if (!find_symbol(VMLINUX_SYMBOL_STR(module_layout), NULL,
-			 &crc, true, false)) {
-		preempt_enable();
-		BUG();
-	}
-	preempt_enable();
-	return check_version(sechdrs, versindex,
-			     VMLINUX_SYMBOL_STR(module_layout), mod, crc,
-			     NULL);
-}
-
-/* First part is kernel version, which we ignore if module has crcs. */
-static inline int same_magic(const char *amagic, const char *bmagic,
-			     bool has_crcs)
-{
-	if (has_crcs) {
-		amagic += strcspn(amagic, " ");
-		bmagic += strcspn(bmagic, " ");
-	}
-	return strcmp(amagic, bmagic) == 0;
-}
-#else
-static inline int check_version(Elf_Shdr *sechdrs,
-				unsigned int versindex,
-				const char *symname,
-				struct module *mod,
-				const unsigned long *crc,
-				const struct module *crc_owner)
-{
-	return 1;
-}
-
-static inline int check_modstruct_version(Elf_Shdr *sechdrs,
-					  unsigned int versindex,
-					  struct module *mod)
-{
-	return 1;
-}
-
-static inline int same_magic(const char *amagic, const char *bmagic,
-			     bool has_crcs)
-{
-	return strcmp(amagic, bmagic) == 0;
-}
-#endif /* CONFIG_MODVERSIONS */
-
 /* Resolve a symbol for this module.  I.e. if we find one, record usage. */
 static const struct kernel_symbol *resolve_symbol(struct module *mod,
 						  const struct load_info *info,
@@ -1376,7 +1242,6 @@  static const struct kernel_symbol *resolve_symbol(struct module *mod,
 {
 	struct module *owner;
 	const struct kernel_symbol *sym;
-	const unsigned long *crc;
 	int err;
 
 	/*
@@ -1386,24 +1251,15 @@  static const struct kernel_symbol *resolve_symbol(struct module *mod,
 	 */
 	sched_annotate_sleep();
 	mutex_lock(&module_mutex);
-	sym = find_symbol(name, &owner, &crc,
-			  !(mod->taints & (1 << TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE)), true);
+	sym = find_symbol(name, &owner,
+			!(mod->taints & (1 << TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE)), true);
 	if (!sym)
 		goto unlock;
 
-	if (!check_version(info->sechdrs, info->index.vers, name, mod, crc,
-			   owner)) {
-		sym = ERR_PTR(-EINVAL);
-		goto getname;
-	}
-
 	err = ref_module(mod, owner);
-	if (err) {
+	if (err)
 		sym = ERR_PTR(err);
-		goto getname;
-	}
 
-getname:
 	/* We must make copy under the lock if we failed to get ref. */
 	strncpy(ownername, module_name(owner), MODULE_NAME_LEN);
 unlock:
@@ -2149,7 +2005,7 @@  void *__symbol_get(const char *symbol)
 	const struct kernel_symbol *sym;
 
 	preempt_disable();
-	sym = find_symbol(symbol, &owner, NULL, true, true);
+	sym = find_symbol(symbol, &owner, true, true);
 	if (sym && strong_try_module_get(owner))
 		sym = NULL;
 	preempt_enable();
@@ -2184,7 +2040,7 @@  static int verify_export_symbols(struct module *mod)
 
 	for (i = 0; i < ARRAY_SIZE(arr); i++) {
 		for (s = arr[i].sym; s < arr[i].sym + arr[i].num; s++) {
-			if (find_symbol(s->name, &owner, NULL, true, false)) {
+			if (find_symbol(s->name, &owner, true, false)) {
 				pr_err("%s: exports duplicate symbol %s"
 				       " (owned by %s)\n",
 				       mod->name, s->name, module_name(owner));
@@ -2876,14 +2732,9 @@  static int rewrite_section_headers(struct load_info *info, int flags)
 #endif
 	}
 
-	/* Track but don't keep modinfo and version sections. */
-	if (flags & MODULE_INIT_IGNORE_MODVERSIONS)
-		info->index.vers = 0; /* Pretend no __versions section! */
-	else
-		info->index.vers = find_sec(info, "__versions");
 	info->index.info = find_sec(info, ".modinfo");
 	info->sechdrs[info->index.info].sh_flags &= ~(unsigned long)SHF_ALLOC;
-	info->sechdrs[info->index.vers].sh_flags &= ~(unsigned long)SHF_ALLOC;
+
 	return 0;
 }
 
@@ -2936,10 +2787,6 @@  static struct module *setup_load_info(struct load_info *info, int flags)
 
 	info->index.pcpu = find_pcpusec(info);
 
-	/* Check module struct version now, before we try to use module. */
-	if (!check_modstruct_version(info->sechdrs, info->index.vers, mod))
-		return ERR_PTR(-ENOEXEC);
-
 	return mod;
 }
 
@@ -2956,7 +2803,7 @@  static int check_modinfo(struct module *mod, struct load_info *info, int flags)
 		err = try_to_force_load(mod, "bad vermagic");
 		if (err)
 			return err;
-	} else if (!same_magic(modmagic, vermagic, info->index.vers)) {
+	} else if (strcmp(modmagic, vermagic)) {
 		pr_err("%s: version magic '%s' should be '%s'\n",
 		       mod->name, modmagic, vermagic);
 		return -ENOEXEC;
@@ -2991,26 +2838,21 @@  static int find_module_sections(struct module *mod, struct load_info *info)
 			       sizeof(*mod->kp), &mod->num_kp);
 	mod->syms = section_objs(info, "__ksymtab",
 				 sizeof(*mod->syms), &mod->num_syms);
-	mod->crcs = section_addr(info, "__kcrctab");
 	mod->gpl_syms = section_objs(info, "__ksymtab_gpl",
 				     sizeof(*mod->gpl_syms),
 				     &mod->num_gpl_syms);
-	mod->gpl_crcs = section_addr(info, "__kcrctab_gpl");
 	mod->gpl_future_syms = section_objs(info,
 					    "__ksymtab_gpl_future",
 					    sizeof(*mod->gpl_future_syms),
 					    &mod->num_gpl_future_syms);
-	mod->gpl_future_crcs = section_addr(info, "__kcrctab_gpl_future");
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_UNUSED_SYMBOLS
 	mod->unused_syms = section_objs(info, "__ksymtab_unused",
 					sizeof(*mod->unused_syms),
 					&mod->num_unused_syms);
-	mod->unused_crcs = section_addr(info, "__kcrctab_unused");
 	mod->unused_gpl_syms = section_objs(info, "__ksymtab_unused_gpl",
 					    sizeof(*mod->unused_gpl_syms),
 					    &mod->num_unused_gpl_syms);
-	mod->unused_gpl_crcs = section_addr(info, "__kcrctab_unused_gpl");
 #endif
 #ifdef CONFIG_CONSTRUCTORS
 	mod->ctors = section_objs(info, ".ctors",
@@ -3159,19 +3001,6 @@  static int check_module_license_and_versions(struct module *mod)
 	if (!prev_taint && test_taint(TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE))
 		pr_warn("%s: module license taints kernel.\n", mod->name);
 
-#ifdef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
-	if ((mod->num_syms && !mod->crcs)
-	    || (mod->num_gpl_syms && !mod->gpl_crcs)
-	    || (mod->num_gpl_future_syms && !mod->gpl_future_crcs)
-#ifdef CONFIG_UNUSED_SYMBOLS
-	    || (mod->num_unused_syms && !mod->unused_crcs)
-	    || (mod->num_unused_gpl_syms && !mod->unused_gpl_crcs)
-#endif
-		) {
-		return try_to_force_load(mod,
-					 "no versions for exported symbols");
-	}
-#endif
 	return 0;
 }
 
@@ -4273,15 +4102,3 @@  void print_modules(void)
 	pr_cont("\n");
 }
 
-#ifdef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
-/* Generate the signature for all relevant module structures here.
- * If these change, we don't want to try to parse the module. */
-void module_layout(struct module *mod,
-		   struct modversion_info *ver,
-		   struct kernel_param *kp,
-		   struct kernel_symbol *ks,
-		   struct tracepoint * const *tp)
-{
-}
-EXPORT_SYMBOL(module_layout);
-#endif
diff --git a/scripts/Makefile b/scripts/Makefile
index 1d80897..675a266 100644
--- a/scripts/Makefile
+++ b/scripts/Makefile
@@ -40,7 +40,6 @@  build_docproc: $(obj)/docproc
 build_check-lc_ctype: $(obj)/check-lc_ctype
 	@:
 
-subdir-$(CONFIG_MODVERSIONS) += genksyms
 subdir-y                     += mod
 subdir-$(CONFIG_SECURITY_SELINUX) += selinux
 subdir-$(CONFIG_DTC)         += dtc
diff --git a/scripts/Makefile.build b/scripts/Makefile.build
index 7675d11..5aa0fea 100644
--- a/scripts/Makefile.build
+++ b/scripts/Makefile.build
@@ -159,60 +159,12 @@  cmd_cpp_i_c       = $(CPP) $(c_flags) -o $@ $<
 $(obj)/%.i: $(src)/%.c FORCE
 	$(call if_changed_dep,cpp_i_c)
 
-# These mirror gensymtypes_S and co below, keep them in synch.
-cmd_gensymtypes_c =                                                         \
-    $(CPP) -D__GENKSYMS__ $(c_flags) $< |                                   \
-    $(GENKSYMS) $(if $(1), -T $(2))                                         \
-     $(patsubst y,-s _,$(CONFIG_HAVE_UNDERSCORE_SYMBOL_PREFIX))             \
-     $(if $(KBUILD_PRESERVE),-p)                                            \
-     -r $(firstword $(wildcard $(2:.symtypes=.symref) /dev/null))
-
-quiet_cmd_cc_symtypes_c = SYM $(quiet_modtag) $@
-cmd_cc_symtypes_c =                                                         \
-    set -e;                                                                 \
-    $(call cmd_gensymtypes_c,true,$@) >/dev/null;                           \
-    test -s $@ || rm -f $@
-
-$(obj)/%.symtypes : $(src)/%.c FORCE
-	$(call cmd,cc_symtypes_c)
-
 # C (.c) files
 # The C file is compiled and updated dependency information is generated.
 # (See cmd_cc_o_c + relevant part of rule_cc_o_c)
-
 quiet_cmd_cc_o_c = CC $(quiet_modtag)  $@
-
-ifndef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
 cmd_cc_o_c = $(CC) $(c_flags) -c -o $@ $<
 
-else
-# When module versioning is enabled the following steps are executed:
-# o compile a .tmp_<file>.o from <file>.c
-# o if .tmp_<file>.o doesn't contain a __ksymtab version, i.e. does
-#   not export symbols, we just rename .tmp_<file>.o to <file>.o and
-#   are done.
-# o otherwise, we calculate symbol versions using the good old
-#   genksyms on the preprocessed source and postprocess them in a way
-#   that they are usable as a linker script
-# o generate <file>.o from .tmp_<file>.o using the linker to
-#   replace the unresolved symbols __crc_exported_symbol with
-#   the actual value of the checksum generated by genksyms
-
-cmd_cc_o_c = $(CC) $(c_flags) -c -o $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F) $<
-
-cmd_modversions_c =								\
-	if $(OBJDUMP) -h $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F) | grep -q __ksymtab; then		\
-		$(call cmd_gensymtypes_c,$(KBUILD_SYMTYPES),$(@:.o=.symtypes))	\
-		    > $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F:.o=.ver);					\
-										\
-		$(LD) $(LDFLAGS) -r -o $@ $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F) 			\
-			-T $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F:.o=.ver);				\
-		rm -f $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F) $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F:.o=.ver);		\
-	else									\
-		mv -f $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F) $@;					\
-	fi;
-endif
-
 ifdef CONFIG_FTRACE_MCOUNT_RECORD
 ifdef BUILD_C_RECORDMCOUNT
 ifeq ("$(origin RECORDMCOUNT_WARN)", "command line")
@@ -270,14 +222,12 @@  endif # CONFIG_STACK_VALIDATION
 define rule_cc_o_c
 	$(call echo-cmd,checksrc) $(cmd_checksrc)			  \
 	$(call cmd_and_fixdep,cc_o_c)					  \
-	$(cmd_modversions_c)						  \
 	$(cmd_objtool)						          \
 	$(call echo-cmd,record_mcount) $(cmd_record_mcount)
 endef
 
 define rule_as_o_S
 	$(call cmd_and_fixdep,as_o_S)					  \
-	$(cmd_modversions_S)						  \
 	$(cmd_objtool)
 endef
 
@@ -317,39 +267,6 @@  modkern_aflags := $(KBUILD_AFLAGS_KERNEL) $(AFLAGS_KERNEL)
 $(real-objs-m)      : modkern_aflags := $(KBUILD_AFLAGS_MODULE) $(AFLAGS_MODULE)
 $(real-objs-m:.o=.s): modkern_aflags := $(KBUILD_AFLAGS_MODULE) $(AFLAGS_MODULE)
 
-# .S file exports must have their C prototypes defined in asm/asm-prototypes.h
-# or a file that it includes, in order to get versioned symbols. We build a
-# dummy C file that includes asm-prototypes and the EXPORT_SYMBOL lines from
-# the .S file (with trailing ';'), and run genksyms on that, to extract vers.
-#
-# This is convoluted. The .S file must first be preprocessed to run guards and
-# expand names, then the resulting exports must be constructed into plain
-# EXPORT_SYMBOL(symbol); to build our dummy C file, and that gets preprocessed
-# to make the genksyms input.
-#
-# These mirror gensymtypes_c and co above, keep them in synch.
-cmd_gensymtypes_S =                                                         \
-    (echo "\#include <linux/kernel.h>" ;                                    \
-     echo "\#include <asm/asm-prototypes.h>" ;                              \
-    $(CPP) $(a_flags) $< |                                                  \
-     grep "\<___EXPORT_SYMBOL\>" |                                          \
-     sed 's/.*___EXPORT_SYMBOL[[:space:]]*\([a-zA-Z0-9_]*\)[[:space:]]*,.*/EXPORT_SYMBOL(\1);/' ) | \
-    $(CPP) -D__GENKSYMS__ $(c_flags) -xc - |                                \
-    $(GENKSYMS) $(if $(1), -T $(2))                                         \
-     $(patsubst y,-s _,$(CONFIG_HAVE_UNDERSCORE_SYMBOL_PREFIX))             \
-     $(if $(KBUILD_PRESERVE),-p)                                            \
-     -r $(firstword $(wildcard $(2:.symtypes=.symref) /dev/null))
-
-quiet_cmd_cc_symtypes_S = SYM $(quiet_modtag) $@
-cmd_cc_symtypes_S =                                                         \
-    set -e;                                                                 \
-    $(call cmd_gensymtypes_S,true,$@) >/dev/null;                           \
-    test -s $@ || rm -f $@
-
-$(obj)/%.symtypes : $(src)/%.S FORCE
-	$(call cmd,cc_symtypes_S)
-
-
 quiet_cmd_cpp_s_S = CPP $(quiet_modtag) $@
 cmd_cpp_s_S       = $(CPP) $(a_flags) -o $@ $<
 
@@ -357,38 +274,8 @@  $(obj)/%.s: $(src)/%.S FORCE
 	$(call if_changed_dep,cpp_s_S)
 
 quiet_cmd_as_o_S = AS $(quiet_modtag)  $@
-
-ifndef CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
 cmd_as_o_S = $(CC) $(a_flags) -c -o $@ $<
 
-else
-
-ASM_PROTOTYPES := $(wildcard $(srctree)/arch/$(SRCARCH)/include/asm/asm-prototypes.h)
-
-ifeq ($(ASM_PROTOTYPES),)
-cmd_as_o_S = $(CC) $(a_flags) -c -o $@ $<
-
-else
-
-# versioning matches the C process described above, with difference that
-# we parse asm-prototypes.h C header to get function definitions.
-
-cmd_as_o_S = $(CC) $(a_flags) -c -o $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F) $<
-
-cmd_modversions_S =								\
-	if $(OBJDUMP) -h $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F) | grep -q __ksymtab; then		\
-		$(call cmd_gensymtypes_S,$(KBUILD_SYMTYPES),$(@:.o=.symtypes))	\
-		    > $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F:.o=.ver);					\
-										\
-		$(LD) $(LDFLAGS) -r -o $@ $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F) 			\
-			-T $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F:.o=.ver);				\
-		rm -f $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F) $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F:.o=.ver);		\
-	else									\
-		mv -f $(@D)/.tmp_$(@F) $@;					\
-	fi;
-endif
-endif
-
 $(obj)/%.o: $(src)/%.S $(objtool_obj) FORCE
 	$(call if_changed_rule,as_o_S)
 
diff --git a/scripts/Makefile.lib b/scripts/Makefile.lib
index 0a07f90..68018a6 100644
--- a/scripts/Makefile.lib
+++ b/scripts/Makefile.lib
@@ -89,8 +89,7 @@  multi-objs-m	:= $(addprefix $(obj)/,$(multi-objs-m))
 subdir-ym	:= $(addprefix $(obj)/,$(subdir-ym))
 obj-dirs	:= $(addprefix $(obj)/,$(obj-dirs))
 
-# These flags are needed for modversions and compiling, so we define them here
-# already
+# These flags are needed for compiling, so we define them here already
 # $(modname_flags) #defines KBUILD_MODNAME as the name of the module it will
 # end up in (or would, if it gets compiled in)
 # Note: Files that end up in two or more modules are compiled without the
diff --git a/scripts/Makefile.modpost b/scripts/Makefile.modpost
index 16923ba..eb3d3c6 100644
--- a/scripts/Makefile.modpost
+++ b/scripts/Makefile.modpost
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@ 
 # ===========================================================================
-# Module versions
+# Module final link
 # ===========================================================================
 #
 # Stage one of module building created the following:
diff --git a/scripts/adjust_autoksyms.sh b/scripts/adjust_autoksyms.sh
index 8dc1918..944c0bf 100755
--- a/scripts/adjust_autoksyms.sh
+++ b/scripts/adjust_autoksyms.sh
@@ -67,11 +67,6 @@  while read sym; do
 	echo "#define __KSYM_${sym} 1"
 done >> "$new_ksyms_file"
 
-# Special case for modversions (see modpost.c)
-if [ -n "$CONFIG_MODVERSIONS" ]; then
-	echo "#define __KSYM_module_layout 1" >> "$new_ksyms_file"
-fi
-
 # Extract changes between old and new list and touch corresponding
 # dependency files.
 changed=$(
diff --git a/scripts/export_report.pl b/scripts/export_report.pl
index 8f79b70..255ef81 100755
--- a/scripts/export_report.pl
+++ b/scripts/export_report.pl
@@ -102,8 +102,6 @@  close($module_symvers);
 #
 # collect the usage count of each symbol.
 #
-my $modversion_warnings = 0;
-
 foreach my $thismod (@allcfiles) {
 	my $module;
 
@@ -112,30 +110,15 @@  foreach my $thismod (@allcfiles) {
 		next;
 	}
 
-	my $state=0;
 	while ( <$module> ) {
 		chomp;
-		if ($state == 0) {
-			$state = 1 if ($_ =~ /static const struct modversion_info/);
-			next;
-		}
-		if ($state == 1) {
-			$state = 2 if ($_ =~ /__attribute__\(\(section\("__versions"\)\)\)/);
+		if ( $_ !~ /0x[0-9a-f]+,/ ) {
 			next;
 		}
-		if ($state == 2) {
-			if ( $_ !~ /0x[0-9a-f]+,/ ) {
-				next;
-			}
-			my $sym = (split /([,"])/,)[4];
-			my ($module, $value, $symbol, $gpl) = @{$SYMBOL{$sym}};
-			$SYMBOL{ $sym } =  [ $module, $value+1, $symbol, $gpl];
-			push(@{$MODULE{$thismod}} , $sym);
-		}
-	}
-	if ($state != 2) {
-		warn "WARNING:$thismod is not built with CONFIG_MODVERSIONS enabled\n";
-		$modversion_warnings++;
+		my $sym = (split /([,"])/,)[4];
+		my ($module, $value, $symbol, $gpl) = @{$SYMBOL{$sym}};
+		$SYMBOL{ $sym } =  [ $module, $value+1, $symbol, $gpl];
+		push(@{$MODULE{$thismod}} , $sym);
 	}
 	close($module);
 }
@@ -169,9 +152,6 @@  printf("SECTION 2:\n\tThis section reports export-symbol-usage of in-kernel
 modules. Each module lists the modules, and the symbols from that module that
 it uses.  Each listed symbol reports the number of modules using it\n");
 
-print "\nNOTE: Got $modversion_warnings CONFIG_MODVERSIONS warnings\n\n"
-    if $modversion_warnings;
-
 print "~"x80 , "\n";
 for my $thismod (sort keys %MODULE) {
 	my $list = $MODULE{$thismod};
diff --git a/scripts/mksysmap b/scripts/mksysmap
index a35acc0..7226ade 100755
--- a/scripts/mksysmap
+++ b/scripts/mksysmap
@@ -37,8 +37,6 @@ 
 
 # readprofile starts reading symbols when _stext is found, and
 # continue until it finds a symbol which is not either of 'T', 't',
-# 'W' or 'w'. __crc_ are 'A' and placed in the middle
-# so we just ignore them to let readprofile continue to work.
-# (At least sparc64 has __crc_ in the middle).
+# 'W' or 'w'.
 
-$NM -n $1 | grep -v '\( [aNUw] \)\|\(__crc_\)\|\( \$[adt]\)\|\( .L\)' > $2
+$NM -n $1 | grep -v '\( [aNUw] \)\|\( \$[adt]\)\|\( .L\)' > $2
diff --git a/scripts/mod/modpost.c b/scripts/mod/modpost.c
index bd83497..c929794 100644
--- a/scripts/mod/modpost.c
+++ b/scripts/mod/modpost.c
@@ -23,8 +23,6 @@ 
 #include "../../include/linux/license.h"
 #include "../../include/linux/export.h"
 
-/* Are we using CONFIG_MODVERSIONS? */
-static int modversions = 0;
 /* Warn about undefined symbols? (do so if we have vmlinux) */
 static int have_vmlinux = 0;
 /* Is CONFIG_MODULE_SRCVERSION_ALL set? */
@@ -159,13 +157,11 @@  static struct module *new_module(const char *modname)
 struct symbol {
 	struct symbol *next;
 	struct module *module;
-	unsigned int crc;
-	int crc_valid;
 	unsigned int weak:1;
 	unsigned int vmlinux:1;    /* 1 if symbol is defined in vmlinux */
 	unsigned int kernel:1;     /* 1 if symbol is from kernel
 				    *  (only for external modules) **/
-	unsigned int preloaded:1;  /* 1 if symbol from Module.symvers, or crc */
+	unsigned int preloaded:1;  /* 1 if symbol from Module.symvers */
 	enum export  export;       /* Type of export */
 	char name[0];
 };
@@ -328,20 +324,6 @@  static struct symbol *sym_add_exported(const char *name, struct module *mod,
 	return s;
 }
 
-static void sym_update_crc(const char *name, struct module *mod,
-			   unsigned int crc, enum export export)
-{
-	struct symbol *s = find_symbol(name);
-
-	if (!s) {
-		s = new_symbol(name, mod, export);
-		/* Don't complain when we find it later. */
-		s->preloaded = 1;
-	}
-	s->crc = crc;
-	s->crc_valid = 1;
-}
-
 void *grab_file(const char *filename, unsigned long *size)
 {
 	struct stat st;
@@ -601,13 +583,11 @@  static int ignore_undef_symbol(struct elf_info *info, const char *symname)
 	return 0;
 }
 
-#define CRC_PFX     VMLINUX_SYMBOL_STR(__crc_)
 #define KSYMTAB_PFX VMLINUX_SYMBOL_STR(__ksymtab_)
 
 static void handle_modversions(struct module *mod, struct elf_info *info,
 			       Elf_Sym *sym, const char *symname)
 {
-	unsigned int crc;
 	enum export export;
 
 	if ((!is_vmlinux(mod->name) || mod->is_dot_o) &&
@@ -616,13 +596,6 @@  static void handle_modversions(struct module *mod, struct elf_info *info,
 	else
 		export = export_from_sec(info, get_secindex(info, sym));
 
-	/* CRC'd symbol */
-	if (strncmp(symname, CRC_PFX, strlen(CRC_PFX)) == 0) {
-		crc = (unsigned int) sym->st_value;
-		sym_update_crc(symname + strlen(CRC_PFX), mod, crc,
-				export);
-	}
-
 	switch (sym->st_shndx) {
 	case SHN_COMMON:
 		if (!strncmp(symname, "__gnu_lto_", sizeof("__gnu_lto_")-1)) {
@@ -1979,13 +1952,6 @@  static void read_symbols(char *modname)
 				sizeof(mod->srcversion)-1);
 
 	parse_elf_finish(&info);
-
-	/* Our trick to get versioning for module struct etc. - it's
-	 * never passed as an argument to an exported function, so
-	 * the automatic versioning doesn't pick it up, but it's really
-	 * important anyhow */
-	if (modversions)
-		mod->unres = alloc_symbol("module_layout", 0, mod->unres);
 }
 
 static void read_symbols_from_files(const char *filename)
@@ -2137,70 +2103,6 @@  static void add_staging_flag(struct buffer *b, const char *name)
 		buf_printf(b, "\nMODULE_INFO(staging, \"Y\");\n");
 }
 
-/* In kernel, this size is defined in linux/module.h;
- * here we use Elf_Addr instead of long for covering cross-compile
- */
-#define MODULE_NAME_LEN (64 - sizeof(Elf_Addr))
-
-/**
- * Record CRCs for unresolved symbols
- **/
-static int add_versions(struct buffer *b, struct module *mod)
-{
-	struct symbol *s, *exp;
-	int err = 0;
-
-	for (s = mod->unres; s; s = s->next) {
-		exp = find_symbol(s->name);
-		if (!exp || exp->module == mod) {
-			if (have_vmlinux && !s->weak) {
-				if (warn_unresolved) {
-					warn("\"%s\" [%s.ko] undefined!\n",
-					     s->name, mod->name);
-				} else {
-					merror("\"%s\" [%s.ko] undefined!\n",
-					       s->name, mod->name);
-					err = 1;
-				}
-			}
-			continue;
-		}
-		s->module = exp->module;
-		s->crc_valid = exp->crc_valid;
-		s->crc = exp->crc;
-	}
-
-	if (!modversions)
-		return err;
-
-	buf_printf(b, "\n");
-	buf_printf(b, "static const struct modversion_info ____versions[]\n");
-	buf_printf(b, "__used\n");
-	buf_printf(b, "__attribute__((section(\"__versions\"))) = {\n");
-
-	for (s = mod->unres; s; s = s->next) {
-		if (!s->module)
-			continue;
-		if (!s->crc_valid) {
-			warn("\"%s\" [%s.ko] has no CRC!\n",
-				s->name, mod->name);
-			continue;
-		}
-		if (strlen(s->name) >= MODULE_NAME_LEN) {
-			merror("too long symbol \"%s\" [%s.ko]\n",
-			       s->name, mod->name);
-			err = 1;
-			break;
-		}
-		buf_printf(b, "\t{ %#8x, __VMLINUX_SYMBOL_STR(%s) },\n",
-			   s->crc, s->name);
-	}
-
-	buf_printf(b, "};\n");
-
-	return err;
-}
-
 static void add_depends(struct buffer *b, struct module *mod,
 			struct module *modules)
 {
@@ -2290,7 +2192,7 @@  static void write_if_changed(struct buffer *b, const char *fname)
 }
 
 /* parse Module.symvers file. line format:
- * 0x12345678<tab>symbol<tab>module[[<tab>export]<tab>something]
+ * symbol<tab>module[[<tab>export]<tab>something]
  **/
 static void read_dump(const char *fname, unsigned int kernel)
 {
@@ -2303,14 +2205,11 @@  static void read_dump(const char *fname, unsigned int kernel)
 		return;
 
 	while ((line = get_next_line(&pos, file, size))) {
-		char *symname, *modname, *d, *export, *end;
-		unsigned int crc;
+		char *symname, *modname, *export, *end;
 		struct module *mod;
 		struct symbol *s;
 
-		if (!(symname = strchr(line, '\t')))
-			goto fail;
-		*symname++ = '\0';
+		symname = line;
 		if (!(modname = strchr(symname, '\t')))
 			goto fail;
 		*modname++ = '\0';
@@ -2318,8 +2217,7 @@  static void read_dump(const char *fname, unsigned int kernel)
 			*export++ = '\0';
 		if (export && ((end = strchr(export, '\t')) != NULL))
 			*end = '\0';
-		crc = strtoul(line, &d, 16);
-		if (*symname == '\0' || *modname == '\0' || *d != '\0')
+		if (*symname == '\0' || *modname == '\0')
 			goto fail;
 		mod = find_module(modname);
 		if (!mod) {
@@ -2331,7 +2229,6 @@  static void read_dump(const char *fname, unsigned int kernel)
 		s = sym_add_exported(symname, mod, export_no(export));
 		s->kernel    = kernel;
 		s->preloaded = 1;
-		sym_update_crc(symname, mod, crc, export_no(export));
 	}
 	release_file(file, size);
 	return;
@@ -2363,9 +2260,8 @@  static void write_dump(const char *fname)
 		symbol = symbolhash[n];
 		while (symbol) {
 			if (dump_sym(symbol))
-				buf_printf(&buf, "0x%08x\t%s\t%s\t%s\n",
-					symbol->crc, symbol->name,
-					symbol->module->name,
+				buf_printf(&buf, "%s\t%s\t%s\n",
+					symbol->name, symbol->module->name,
 					export_str(symbol->export));
 			symbol = symbol->next;
 		}
@@ -2406,9 +2302,6 @@  int main(int argc, char **argv)
 			extsym_iter->file = optarg;
 			extsym_start = extsym_iter;
 			break;
-		case 'm':
-			modversions = 1;
-			break;
 		case 'n':
 			ignore_missing_files = 1;
 			break;
@@ -2474,7 +2367,6 @@  int main(int argc, char **argv)
 		add_header(&buf, mod);
 		add_intree_flag(&buf, !external_module);
 		add_staging_flag(&buf, mod->name);
-		err |= add_versions(&buf, mod);
 		add_depends(&buf, mod, modules);
 		add_moddevtable(&buf, mod);
 		add_srcversion(&buf, mod);
diff --git a/scripts/module-common.lds b/scripts/module-common.lds
index 73a2c7d..da76f519a 100644
--- a/scripts/module-common.lds
+++ b/scripts/module-common.lds
@@ -11,11 +11,6 @@  SECTIONS {
 	__ksymtab_unused	0 : { *(SORT(___ksymtab_unused+*)) }
 	__ksymtab_unused_gpl	0 : { *(SORT(___ksymtab_unused_gpl+*)) }
 	__ksymtab_gpl_future	0 : { *(SORT(___ksymtab_gpl_future+*)) }
-	__kcrctab		0 : { *(SORT(___kcrctab+*)) }
-	__kcrctab_gpl		0 : { *(SORT(___kcrctab_gpl+*)) }
-	__kcrctab_unused	0 : { *(SORT(___kcrctab_unused+*)) }
-	__kcrctab_unused_gpl	0 : { *(SORT(___kcrctab_unused_gpl+*)) }
-	__kcrctab_gpl_future	0 : { *(SORT(___kcrctab_gpl_future+*)) }
 
 	. = ALIGN(8);
 	.init_array		0 : { *(SORT(.init_array.*)) *(.init_array) }
diff --git a/scripts/namespace.pl b/scripts/namespace.pl
index 9f3c9d4..e76f858 100755
--- a/scripts/namespace.pl
+++ b/scripts/namespace.pl
@@ -306,14 +306,12 @@  sub do_nm
 				$name !~ /^__parm_/ &&
 				$name !~ /^__kstrtab/ &&
 				$name !~ /^__ksymtab/ &&
-				$name !~ /^__kcrctab_/ &&
 				$name !~ /^__exitcall_/ &&
 				$name !~ /^__initcall_/ &&
 				$name !~ /^__kdb_initcall_/ &&
 				$name !~ /^__kdb_exitcall_/ &&
 				$name !~ /^__module_/ &&
 				$name !~ /^__mod_/ &&
-				$name !~ /^__crc_/ &&
 				$name ne '__this_module' &&
 				$name ne 'kernel_version') {
 				if (!exists($def{$name})) {