changed section .rela.rodata not selected for inclusion

[joe-lawrence]

patch.txt

I'm testing a patch (see attached) for CVE-2014-3690 against RHEL7.3 GA + kernel-3.10.0-200.el7.x86_64 (rebuilt by RHEL7.3 GA toolset) and was running into the following kpatch-build error:

Using cache at /root/.kpatch/src
Testing patch file
checking file arch/x86/kvm/vmx.c
Reading special section data
Building original kernel
Building patched kernel
Extracting new and modified ELF sections
ERROR: vmx.o: 1 unsupported section change(s)
vmx.o: new function: vmx_set_constant_host_state
vmx.o: changed function: prepare_vmcs02.constprop.94
vmx.o: changed function: vmx_create_vcpu
vmx.o: changed function: vmx_vcpu_run
vmx.o: changed section .rela.rodata not selected for inclusion
/usr/local/libexec/kpatch/create-diff-object: unreconcilable difference
ERROR: 1 error(s) encountered. Check /root/.kpatch/build.log for more details.

readelf does indeed show a difference in this section between the original and
patched object files:

% readelf -x 395 $ORIG

Hex dump of section '.rela.rodata':
  0x00000000 00000000 00000000 01000000 c8010000 ................
  0x00000010 b9010000 00000000                   ........


% readelf -x 395 $PATCHED

Hex dump of section '.rela.rodata':
  0x00000000 00000000 00000000 01000000 c8010000 ................
  0x00000010 e9010000 00000000                   ........
             ^

[telala]

got the same problem:
patch:

static void __noclone vmx_vcpu_run(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu)
 {
        struct vcpu_vmx *vmx = to_vmx(vcpu);
        unsigned long debugctlmsr, cr4;
       +       unsigned long vmx_return_new = 0;


        /* Record the guest's net vcpu time for enforced NMI injections. */
        if (unlikely(!cpu_has_virtual_nmis() && vmx->soft_vnmi_blocked))
@@ -8534,6 +8601,7 @@ static void __noclone vmx_vcpu_run(struct kvm_vcpu *vcpu)
        if (vcpu->guest_debug & KVM_GUESTDBG_SINGLESTEP)
                vmx_set_interrupt_shadow(vcpu, 0);



    +   vmcs_writel(HOST_RIP, vmx_return_new);
        atomic_switch_perf_msrs(vmx);
        debugctlmsr = get_debugctlmsr();

kpatch-build output:
Using source directory at /data/kvm3.0_kernel
chenxg: here....
Testing patch file(s)
Reading special section data
Building original kernel
Building patched kernel
Extracting new and modified ELF sections
ERROR: vmx.o: 1 unsupported section change(s)
vmx.o: changed function: vmx_vcpu_run
vmx.o: changed section .rela.rodata not selected for inclusion
/data/kpatch/kpatch-build/create-diff-object: unreconcilable difference
ERROR: 1 error(s) encountered. Check /root/.kpatch/build.log for more details.