Re: types for storing instruction pointers

From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Mon Jun 08 2009 - 09:51:36 EST


On Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 03:25:16PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> * Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Currently the _THIS_IP_ and _RET_IP_ macros aded for lockdep but
> > now available from kernel.org case the instruction pointer to an
> > unsigned long. But the %pf/%pF format for printing them want a
> > pointer of some sort. That's a pretty nasty situation for tracers
> > - can we standardize on one type for it?
>
> Yes but what's the practical problem exactly? Could you cite an
> example?

The simplest tracer in xfs showing this is the following:

/*
* ilock/iolock tracer
*
* Reports the inode, operation, flags and caller for each operation
* on the inode locks.
*/
TRACE_EVENT(xfs_ilock,
TP_PROTO(struct xfs_inode *ip, const char *op, unsigned lockflags,
unsigned long caller_ip),
TP_ARGS(ip, op, lockflags, caller_ip),

TP_STRUCT__entry(
__field(dev_t, dev)
__field(xfs_ino_t, ino)
__field(const char *, op)
__field(int, lockflags)
__field(unsigned long, caller_ip)
),

TP_fast_assign(
__entry->dev = VFS_I(ip)->i_sb->s_dev;
__entry->ino = ip->i_ino;
__entry->op = op;
__entry->lockflags = lockflags;
__entry->caller_ip = caller_ip;
),

TP_printk("dev %d:%d ino 0x%lld %s %s by %pF",
MAJOR(__entry->dev), MINOR(__entry->dev),
__entry->ino,
__entry->op,
__print_flags(__entry->lockflags, "|", XFS_LOCK_FLAGS),
(void *)__entry->caller_ip)
);

It has the following callers:

trace_xfs_ilock(ip, "lock", lock_flags, _RET_IP_);
trace_xfs_ilock(ip, "lock_nowait", lock_flags, _RET_IP_);
trace_xfs_ilock(ip, "unlock", lock_flags, _RET_IP_);
trace_xfs_ilock(ip, "demote", lock_flags, _RET_IP_);

Basically everything obtained via _RET_IP_/_THIS_IP_ needs to be
casted. Given that both need to case the their return value to a
pointer that's rather unfortunately. Life would be much easier
if _RET_IP_/_THIS_IP_ just returned a pointer (probably just a void
pointer, maybe with a fancy typedef to make it clear we're dealing
with an instruction pointer here).
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