Re: Perhaps a side effect regarding NMI returns

[Jason Baron]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 03:58:21PM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-11-29 at 12:36 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 12:31 PM, Andi Kleen <andi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > As a simple fix your proposal of forcing IRET sounds good.
> > 
> > We could of course use iret to return to the regular kernel stack, and
> > do the schedule from there.
> > 
> > So instead of doing the manual stack switch, just build a fake iret
> > stack on our exception stack. Subtle and somewhat complicated. I'd
> > almost rather just do a blind iret, and leave the 'iret to regular
> > stack' as a possible future option.
> 
> Note, the reason that I've been looking at this code, is because I'm
> looking at implementing your idea to handle irets in NMIs, caused by
> faults, exceptions, and the reason I really care about: debugging.
> 
> Your proposal is here:
> 
>   https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/7/14/264
> 
> But to make this work, it would be really nice if the NMI routine wasn't
> convoluted with the paranoid_exit code.
> 
> For things like static_branch()/jump_label and modifying ftrace nops to
> calls and back, we currently use the big hammer approach stop_machine().
> This keeps another CPU from executing code that is being modified.
> There's also tricks to handle NMIs that may be running on the stopped
> CPUs.
> 
> But people don't like the overhead that stop_machine() causes, and I
> have code that can make the modifications for ftrace with break points.
> By adding a break point, syncing, then modifying the code and break

But if there's still has to be some sort of 'syncing' after we add a break
point, how much are we going to save? Or I guess your're using an IPI? 

Thanks,

-Jason

> point to a new op will greatly reduce the overhead. At least the latency
> will be much less.
> 
> The problem is that ftrace affects code in NMIs. We tried to not trace
> NMIs, but there's so many functions that NMIs call, it ended up being a
> losing battle. But if we can fix the NMI enabled on iret, we can then
> use the break point scheme for both static_branch() and ftrace, and
> remove the overhead of stop_machine. I think there's a possibility to
> use kprobes in NMIs too, with this fix.
> 
> -- Steve
> 
> 
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