Roafteriniter

A GCC plugin that looks for __ro_after_init candidates as part of the kernel build process.

Usage

• Install the GCC plugin-dev package. If you are on GCC 7 do:

$ apt-get install gcc-7-plugin-dev

• Build the plugin and (optionally)run tests. Run the arm64_test target if you have an ARM64 cross compiler installed and present in $PATH.

$ make
$ GTEST_LIBPATH=<path-to-libgtest.so> GTEST_INCDIR=<path-to-gtest-headers> make ctest
$ make test
$ make arm64_test

• Run both stages of the plugin on a kernel of your choice.

$ make clean && KDIR=<path-to-kernel-directory> make kern

Stages

When make kern is run, the following steps occur.

• Stage 1 of the plugin is run. The kernel is built with allmodconfig, and a list of interesting types is written out to /tmp/rai_int. All checked types are written out to /tmp/rai_chk.

• Stage 2 of the plugin is run. For each memory write into a variable of type listed in /tmp/rai_int, write an entry into /tmp/rai_final. This entry will contain the variable name, the typename, the function from which this write occured, and whether or not this function is annotated with __init.

• At this stage, the plugins have done their work. All that remains is to process the log(/tmp/rai_final) written out by the plugin. Use cachereader to print out the entries in a readable form, and postprocess.py to list out all variable names to which a write exists only from functions marked annotated with __init.