What triggers the release of 'managed' pci resources? - linux-kernel

If a driver calls pcim_enable_device(), then uses pcim_iomap(), devm_request_irq(), and other managed calls to allocate hardware resources, how does a driver tell the kernel to release those resources?
pcim_release isn't an exported symbol, so something else must cause devres_free() to be called. But what?
Note: I don't need directions on how to release resources manually. I want to know how to get the devres subsystem to release everything. That's what it's for, after all.

pcim_release() becomes the release callback of the struct devres. The release callback is called in release_nodes() via devres_release_all(), which is called from a few places, notably driver_detach().
In short I think you're not meant to worry about it, after all that's the whole point of devres - it manages resources for you, you don't have to worry about the cleanup.

I think you want: pcim_iounmap

Related

Windows: How to intercept Win32 disk I/O API

On Windows, all disk I/O ultimately happens via Win32 API calls like CreateFile, SetFilePointer, etc.
Now, is it possible to intercept these disk I/O Win32 calls and hook in your own code, at run time, for all dynamically-linked Windows applications? That is, applications that get their CreateFile functionality via a Windows DLL instead of a static, C library.
Some constraints that I have are:
No source code: I won't have the source code for the processes I'd like to intercept.
Thread safety: My hook code may dynamically allocate its own memory. Further, because this memory is going to be shared with multiple intercepted processes (and their threads), I'd like to be able to serialize access to it.
Conditional delegation and overriding : In my hook code, I would like to be able to decide whether to delegate to the original Win32 API functionality, or to use my own functionality, or both. (Much like the optional invocation of the super class method in the overriding method of the subclass in C++ or Java.)
Regular user-space code: I want to be able to accomplish the above without having to write any device-driver, mainly due to the complexity involved in writing one.
If this is possible, I'd appreciate some pointers. Source code is not necessary, but is always welcome!
You may want to look into mhook if Detours isn't what you want.
Here are a couple of problems you may run into while working with hooks:
ASLR can prevent injected code from intercepting the intended calls.
If your hooks are global (using AppInit_DLLs for example), only Kernel32.dll and User32.dll are available when your DLL is loaded. If you want to target functions outside of those modules, you'll need to manually make sure they're available.
I suggest you start with Microsoft Detours. It's free edition also exists and its rather powerful stable as well. For injections you will have to find which injection method will work for your applications in target. Not sure whether you need to code those on your own or not, but a simple tool like "Extreme Injector" would serve you well for testing your approaches. And you definitely do not need any kernel-land drivers to be developed for such a simple task, in my opinion at least. In order to get the full help of me and others, I'd like to see your approach first or list more constraints to the problem at hand or where have you started so far, but had problems. This narrows down a lot chit-chats and can save your time as well.
Now, if you are not familiar with Detours from Microsoft (MSFT) please go ahead and download it from the following link: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/detours/ once you download it. You are required to compile it yourself. It's very straightforward and it comes with a compiled HTML help file and samples. So far your profiles falls under IAT (Import Address Table) and EAT (Export Address Table).
I hope this non-snippet answer helps you a little bit in your approach to the solution, and if you get stuck come back again and ask. Best of luck!

Out of Memory Message box

I have an MFC application developed with VS2003
It is working fine in XP vista etc.
But when i have executed it in windows 8, and we use it for some time,
then no window is displayed. Instead of that the a MessageBox with a message 'Out of Memory' is displayed. And the Message box is Having the caption of my application.
This issue is rarely occurred in windows 7 too.
I have tried watching the handles using tools like processexplorer and it is not increasing.
Also many forums says that it is because of increase in unclosed handles or resources.
Can any one suggest how can i find where the issue is. Or any one provide possible reason for this.
I cant setup the devenv in the machine causing the issue. I am confused how to diagnose by executing a test build in that.
Please provide your findings.
Thanks in advance.
You clearly have a memory leak somewhere. It's hard to be any more specific without seeing the code.
A debugger is really the best way to solve this problem. If you can reproduce the problem on your development machine, that would be the easiest case. If not, you can attach a debugger to the running process on another machine, either locally or remotely.
The MFC libraries also support some basic memory leak detection, turned on by default for Debug builds and controllable for other builds using the AfxEnableMemoryTracking function. You can use this feature to obtain information about which blocks of memory were allocated but not properly deallocated (i.e. were leaked).
Like you mentioned, Process Explorer is another good way to track down resource leaks. Are you sure that the handle counts are remaining constant rather than trending upwards over time? If the values in the columns are never changing like the question suggests, then you are surely doing something wrong. Your application has to be creating objects in order to do its job. The point is to make sure that it disposes of them when it is finished.
If you can't reproduce the problem with the running application and have only the source code available, you'll need to go through the code and make sure that every use of new has a corresponding use of delete (and that new[] matches up with delete[]). And in general in C++, you should avoid explicit dynamic memory allocation wherever possible. Instead, use the container classes that are provided either by MFC or the standard library. For example, don't allocate arrays manually, use std::vector to do it for you. These container classes ensure that the memory is automatically deallocated in the destructor when the object goes out of scope.

minifilter vs. API Hooking for file system operations monitoring \ filtering

I need to develop an application that monitors, and potentially filters (rejects the calls), file operations.
It appears that developing a minifilter is the "standard" solution.
another potential method is using API hooks.
are these relevant solutions? (I read in some places the an API hook may not be suitable - but no explanation was given)
are there other options?
API hooking (at least in kernel space) is essentially not supported by microsoft. On x64 (starting from Vista and up) patchguard will usually kill the machine if it detects SSDT hooking or any change whatsoever in critical components of the system. API hooking is very hard to get on a system-wide level because the synchronization primitives that windows uses are not exported so even if you manage to hook the code there is not guarantee that the machine won't crash due to a funky value of EIP at a given moment (this is especially valid when you are unloading a driver that has hooked a function).
Probably your best bet to do it - without using minifilter driver is to try and to direct memory kernel object hooking. You might want to look at OBJECT_TYPE_INITIALIZER definition structure which every object windows has (FILE, EVENT, PORT etc - google around to see them) has as its member. You are particularly interested in the *Procedure function pointers.
It all comes down to what you want/need to accomplish.
If you just need file operations (in the kernel level, file open / file close), and you need it system-wide than I would go with minifilter. It is a long, tedious and time-consuming road, but safer (check out Sysinternals procmon to see what you can get using this method).
If you need a more application-specific control, or if you would like control over the WINAPI level, go with API hooking. It is easier to develop, but there are lots of "mines" that blow up in your face during the way (check out EasyHook, its doing a pretty good job with minimum work).
good luck!
If you are preventing user access to certain resources (files) from a security perspective the correct way is a minifilter. This is because it's the only way you are sure that the user cannot access the filtered resources.
If you use API hook you can intercept calls at kernel32.dll (CreateFileW, FindFirstFile, etc., etc.) but an attacker can uses Native API (ntdll.dl). Of course, you can intercept at Native level (it's more difficult since it's undocumented) but attackers can use differents APIs at kernel switch level. At that level it's not portable to hook. It's almost impossible to prevent creative attackers to access to resources using API hook, that's why it's not recommended for security software.
In my opinion, API hooking is a good option for monitoring. If you want to see what an application is doing, it's very good to use API hook since you can intercept higher level functions than in kernel-mode.
If you can accomplish the task without the hooks - do it. Because hooking is not a supported way of developing applications. There is a lot of pitfalls and antivirus software will treat your application as more dangerous. Also you may face problems with newer/older versions of operating system.
But take into consideration that user-mode code is much easier then kernel-mode. So if user-mode hooks can satisfy your requirements then you may think about them.
I got a follow up question by mail, so i'm adding here the solution we used
The project was canceled before it wen't live, but we evaluated a product (Eldos CallbackFilter) that allows writing kernel filters using user space code.
The product has a generic kernel driver that communicates with user space code that defines the filtering logic.
I would have to contradict LordDoskias as, OBJECT_TYPE_INITIALIZER is not a documented object and this can, has and will change with OS patches and updates.
Do not approach this problem this was as it will only cause more problems and not solve anything.
Not to mention the patch guard which will BSOD the system if you modify system structures.
If you want to restrict access to files there is no way around it than simply using a minifilter. There are several Microsoft samples here that you can draw inspiration from and also learn to implement your driver the correct and supported way.
Lastly and more importantly it is illusory to think that you will be able to block everything you want by hooking techniques and I will just give you one example: mapped files.
Here is a scenario involving notepad which uses mapped files to write it's data to disk.
CreateFile -> obtains file handle -> you see this
CreateFileMapping -> obtains mapping handle -> you don't see this
CloseHandle(FileHandle) -> you see this
MapViewOfFile returning a memory buffer being page backed by the file -> you don't see this
Modify the memory buffer -> you don't see this
Unmap and close the FileMappingHandle -> you don't see this
Async the memory manager's system worker threads make paging writes to the file to keep it in sync. Even after all the handles have been closed or during the in-memory change of the buffer, depending when the OS wants. -> you don't see this
This is what you are missing with hooking. And this is just one scenario. There is a multitude of them, so please do things the right way.
How would that change if you use a minifilter ?
You would of course catch the CreateFile, CreateFileMapping as well ( check FltAcquireForSectionSynchronization callback) and then from the minifilter you will see all the PAGING_WRITE coming from the memory manager (see IoGetTopLevelIrp()) in your Write dispatch callback.
Good luck further.

Windows 7 driver hooking

My question is regarding driver development for Windows 7.
I need to intercept system calls to a driver. Theoretically in such cases it's recommended to create a filter driver, however in my case the driver doesn't expose a filter-compatible interface. It's a Vista/7 display miniport driver to be exact.
Display driver is loaded as a standard WDM driver. In its DriverEntry it's expected to call a DxgkInitialize system routine (exported by win32k.sys I guess). My goal is to intercept this call.
Can anyone suggest me any useful source I can find information about how to achieve this?
The key to the victory is probably replacing the DxgkInitialize within the driver executable import section with the address of my function. The problem is that this should be done after the executable is loaded (mapped + relocated if necessary + all the import table entries are prepared), but before the driver's entry point is invoked.
I thought about the following options:
Map the executable into the system memory and "prepare" it manually (i.e. do the work of the loader). Then patch the needed function(s) and run the entry point.
With some effort ZwSetSystemInformation can be used for module loading (?)
Maybe patch the export section of the module that exports DxgkInitialize. So that the loader automatically will redirect every loaded module into my hands.
Thanks in advance.
You don't provide a business reason for this, so I'd hesitate to say something harsh. But you should reconsider your technological approach if it involves hooking calls.
The steps I'd take would probably include:
Who exports DxgkInitialize? Don't guess win32k, look it up. (I won't give you the answer). Maybe you can easily hook the callee and not the caller.
Do I have any callbacks of when a driver module is loaded but before it's inited? Lookup PsSetLoadImageNotifyRoutine. Maybe it will provide you an appropiate timeslot to patch the drivers IAT (if you don't know what an Import Address table is, reconsider hooking).
I see from the comments that you're primarily interested on "spying on display activities". I'm not sure that's precisely allowed on computers you don't fully control. But lets assume for the sake of the question that this is legal.
Depending on the resolution you want to get, you don't need a driver. Heck, you barely need a DLL. Look up Window hooks for partial solutions and accessibility callbacks.

What exactly is the risk when using TerminateProcess?

My Win32 console applicaton uses a third-party library. After it exits WinMain global objects destruction begins and an AV happens somewhere deep inside. I'm really tempted to just write
TerminateProcess( GetCurrentProcess(), 0 );
somewhere near the end of WinMain. If I do this the application ends gracefully.
But MSDN says that doing so can compromise the state of global data maintained by dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) which is not clear. I understand that if I have some global object its destructor is not run and I risk not finalizing a database connection or something similar. I don't have anything like that in my program.
What exactly is the risk when using TerminateProcess? How do I determine if I can use it for my purpose?
Based on the documentation for that and ExtiProcess it seems the primary concern is that DLL's are unloaded without a call to DllMain with the flag DLL_PROCESS_DETACH.
My 2cents: The documentation is being paranoid that you will upset some critical operation which runs in DllMain + DLL_PROCESS_DETACH. Anyone who depends on that to maintain critical state is already at the mercy of task manager so I don't see a huge risk in using this API.
Generally the bad things will happen when interacting with objects outside of your process. For an example say you have some shared memory used by multiple processes that your process will write to and other processes read and or write to. Typically to synchronize the reading and writing a mutex is used. If a thread in your process has acquired the mutex and is in the middle of making changes when TerminatePorcess is called, the mutex will be abandoned and the shared memory potentially left in an inconsistent state.
I suspect you are miss using one of the third party libraries. DllMain is somewhat limiting so the library may have initialize and uninitialize functions that you are supposed to call.
AFAIK, if you're not doing anything "fancy" (which includes but is not limited to: creating threads, locks, DB connections, using COM objects), nothing terrible will happen. But as Earwicker says, you don't know what OS-wide stuff a DLL is doing, and you certainly don't know if that will change in the future, so relying on this is very fragile.
Aren't you curious to know why this access violation is occurring? It may well be the sign of something that became corrupted much earlier on. Please at least confirm that the bug is caused by this 3rd-party library, e.g. by writing a program that links with the library but whose main() does nothing, and confirming that this causes the same crash.
It depends how you interpret "global data". If you take it to mean (as I normally would) data stored in the process's address space, then the advice makes no sense - we know that memory is going to disappear, so who cares what happens to that?
So it may be referring to OS-wide stuff that a DLL may have done, that persists outside the lifetime of any process. A simple example would be a temporary file that might need to be cleaned up; crash the process too many times and you'll run out of disk space, so probably best not to make a habit of it.

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