Re: [patch 02/10] x86/mce: Disable tracing and kprobes on do_machine_check()

From: Borislav Petkov
Date: Wed Feb 26 2020 - 13:42:44 EST


On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 09:28:51AM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > It entirely depends on what the goal is :-/ On the one hand I see why
> > people might want function tracing / kprobes enabled, OTOH it's all
> > mighty frigging scary. Any tracing/probing/whatever on an MCE has the
> > potential to make a bad situation worse -- not unlike the same on #DF.

FWIW, I had this at the beginning of the #MC handler in a feeble attempt
to poke at this:

+ hw_breakpoint_disable();
+ static_key_disable(&__tracepoint_read_msr.key);
+ tracing_off();

But then Tony noted that some recoverable errors do get reported with an
#MC exception so we would have to look at the error severity and then
decide whether to allow tracing or not.

But the error severity happens all the way down in __mc_scan_banks() -
i.e., we've executed the half handler already.

So, frankly, I wanna say, f*ck tracing etc - there are certain handlers
which simply don't allow it. And we'll only consider changing that when
a really good reason for it appears...

--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.

https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette