On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 01:40:02PM +0100, Quentin Casasnovas wrote:
> __ex_table is a simple table section where each entry is a pair of
> addresses - the first address is an address which can fault in kernel
> space, and the second address points to where the kernel should jump to
> when handling that fault.  This is how copy_from_user() does not crash the
> kernel if userspace gives a borked pointer for example.
> 
> If one of these addresses point to a non-executable section, something is
> seriously wrong since it either means the kernel will never fault from
> there or it will not be able to jump to there.  As both cases are serious
> enough, we simply error out in these cases so the build fails and the
> developper has to fix the issue.
> 
> In case the section is executable, but it isn't referenced in our list of
> authorized sections to point to from __ex_table, we just dump a warning
> giving more information about it.  We do this in case the new section is
> executable but isn't supposed to be executed by the kernel.  This happened
> with .altinstr_replacement, which is executable but is only used to copy
> instructions from - we should never have our instruction pointer pointing
> in .altinstr_replacement.  Admitedly, a proper fix in that case would be to
> just set .altinstr_replacement NX, but we need to warn about future cases
> like this.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Quentin Casasnovas <quentin.casasnovas@oracle.com>
> ---
>  scripts/mod/modpost.c | 141 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 141 insertions(+)

This causes a bunch of mismatch warnings on 32-bit and 64-bit ARM
because there are two additional sections, .text.fixup and
.exception.text that store executable code. I've attached a patch
to fix those, but feel free to squash that into the original commit
if that's still possible.

Also adding Rusty since he applied this to the modules-next tree.

Thierry