Re: utrace comments

[Russell King]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 10:33:31AM +0100, Russell King wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 11:22:00AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 10:18:09AM +0100, Russell King wrote:
> > > Roland's idea of single-stepping is that it *must* be supported by
> > > hardware for utrace to use it.  There are a number of architectures
> > > which can only do single-stepping by modifying the text of the
> > > program being single stepped.  ARM is one such example.
> > > 
> > > As such, even when utrace is complete, some architectures will never
> > > support in-kernel single step with utrace.  I believe Roland's idea
> > > is to have single step supported on these via some vapourware userspace
> > > library.
> > 
> > Does the current arm ptrace code support single stepping in kernelspace?
> > If yes we absolutely need to continue to support it.
> 
> single stepping of user space code via standard ptrace calls, yes.
> 
> > > I'd also like to see utrace become *optional*
> > > for architectures to support, rather than as it currently stands as
> > > a *mandatory* requirement when merged.
> > 
> > No way we'd keep both the old ptrace mess and utrace in the same tree.
> 
> Given the stated arguments from yourself and Roland, that only leaves
> one solution to that.
> 
> I have no real problem with a decision being made to drop kernel-based
> single stepping _provided_ we have some replacement strategy in place
> and readily available.  At the moment I've not seen such a strategy.
> 
> I'm not sure if Roland's expecting architecture maintainers to
> create such a strategy themselves - which would probably turn out to
> being far worse since you could end up with different implementations
> for each architecture.

For the sake of avoiding too much rehash, here's Roland's reply to my
initial forrey into utrace:

  http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=117309251916053&w=2

-- 
Russell King
 Linux kernel    2.6 ARM Linux   - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
 maintainer of:
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