[cgl_discussion] Live patching project announcement

[Daniel McNeil]

On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 04:38, Takashi Ikebe wrote:
> Hello, all.
> NTT announces "pannus" open source project.
> The pannus project provides "AVL.15.0 Live patching"  GPL implementation.
> First version of implementation is available on the web.
> Live patching is on-memory patching which does not need to
> restart/reload process and essential function on NEP's system.
> 
> URL is below.
> http://developer.osdl.jp/projects/pannus/

Hi,

Very interesting.  I took a look and want to make sure I understand
correctly:

The kernel patch allows the pannus command to stop a process, load
a dynamic shared library containing a patch on behalf of the stopped
process, and then patch the process' original function to jump to
the new patched function, and then continue the process.  The process
starts running new code without ever knowing it has been patched.
Is this right?

What prevents the new syscalls from being abused?
Is there anything to prevent anyone being able to stop and/or patch
any running process?

Thanks,

Daniel