On Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 5:04 PM Alexei Starovoitov alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jan 25, 2025 at 5:05 PM Levi Zim rsworktech@outlook.com wrote:
On 2025/1/26 00:58, Alexei Starovoitov wrote:
On Sat, Jan 25, 2025 at 12:30 AM Levi Zim via B4 Relay devnull+rsworktech.outlook.com@kernel.org wrote:
From: Levi Zim rsworktech@outlook.com
This patch add a helper function bpf_probe_read_kernel_dynptr:
long bpf_probe_read_kernel_dynptr(const struct bpf_dynptr *dst, u32 offset, u32 size, const void *unsafe_ptr, u64 flags);
We stopped adding helpers years ago. Only new kfuncs are allowed.
Sorry, I didn't know that. Just asking, is there any documentation/discussion about stopping adding helpers?
I will switch the implementation to kfuncs in v3.
This particular one doesn't look useful as-is. The same logic can be expressed with
- create dynptr
- dynptr_slice
- copy_from_kernel
By copy_from_kernel I assume you mean bpf_probe_read_kernel. The problem with dynptr_slice_rdwr and probe_read_kernel is that they only support a compile-time constant size [1].
But in order to best utilize the space on a BPF ringbuf, it is possible to reserve a variable length of space as dynptr on a ringbuf with bpf_ringbuf_reserve_dynptr.
For our uprobes, we've run into similar issues around doing variable-sized bpf_probe_read_user() into ring buffers for our debugger [1]. Our use case is that we generate uprobes that recursively read data structures until we fill up a buffer. The verifier's insistence on knowing statically that a read fits into the buffer makes for awkward code, and makes it hard to pack the buffer fully; we have to split our reads into a couple of static size classes.
Any chance there'd be interest in taking the opportunity to support dynamically-sized reads from userspace too? :)
That makes sense. The commit log didn't call it out. Please spell out the motivation clearly. Also why bpf_probe_read_kernel_common ? Do we need to memset() it on failure?