Re: [PATCH v3 9/9] KVM: Move instrumentation-safe annotations for enter/exit to x86 code

From: Vasily Gorbik
Date: Fri Apr 23 2021 - 05:33:24 EST


On Thu, Apr 22, 2021 at 04:38:24PM +0200, Sven Schnelle wrote:
> Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > On 16.04.21 00:21, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> >> Drop the instrumentation_{begin,end}() annonations from the common KVM
> >> guest enter/exit helpers, and massage the x86 code as needed to preserve
> >> the necessary annotations. x86 is the only architecture whose transition
> >> flow is tagged as noinstr, and more specifically, it is the only
> >> architecture for which instrumentation_{begin,end}() can be non-empty.
> >> No other architecture supports CONFIG_STACK_VALIDATION=y, and s390
> >> is the
> >> only other architecture that support CONFIG_DEBUG_ENTRY=y. For
> >> instrumentation annontations to be meaningful, both aformentioned configs
> >> must be enabled.
> >> Letting x86 deal with the annotations avoids unnecessary nops by
> >> squashing back-to-back instrumention-safe sequences.
> >
> > We have considered implementing objtool for s390. Not sure where we
> > stand and if we will do this or not. Sven/Heiko?
>
> We are planning to support objtool on s390. Vasily is working on it -
> maybe he has some thoughts about this.

We got CONFIG_DEBUG_ENTRY=y since 5.12, objtool runs on vmlinux.o but I have
not yet enabled --noinstr option in s390 objtool. So, it's hard to say in
advance if this particular change would make things better or worse.
In general, common code annotations are problematic, because arch
specific code is still not identical and this leads sometimes to different
needs for common code annotations.

I'll try to experiment with --noinstr on s390 shortly.