Re: [RFC v2 1/4] ftrace: allow arch-specific check_stack()

From: AKASHI Takahiro
Date: Mon Aug 17 2015 - 02:07:13 EST


Will,

On 08/12/2015 02:03 AM, Will Deacon wrote:
On Tue, Aug 04, 2015 at 08:44:06AM +0100, AKASHI Takahiro wrote:
A stack frame pointer may be used in a different way depending on
cpu architecture. Thus it is not always appropriate to slurp the stack
contents, as currently done in check_stack(), in order to calcurate
a stack index (height) at a given function call. At least not on arm64.

This patch extract potentially arch-specific code from check_stack()
and puts it into a new arch_check_stack(), which is declared as weak.
So we will be able to add arch-specific and most efficient way of
stack traversing Later.

Signed-off-by: AKASHI Takahiro <takahiro.akashi@xxxxxxxxxx>

If arm64 is the only architecture behaving differently, then I'm happy
to reconsider the fix to unwind_frame that we merged in e306dfd06fcb
("ARM64: unwind: Fix PC calculation"). I'd have thought any architecture
with a branch-and-link instruction would potentially have the same issue,
so we could just be fixing things in the wrong place if ftrace works
everywhere else.

I'm not the right person to answer for other architectures (and ftrace
behavior on them.) The only thing I know is that current ftrace stack tracer
works correctly only if the addresses stored and found on stack match to
the ones returned by save_stack_trace().

Anyway, the fix above is not the only reason that I want to introduce arch-specific
arch_check_stack(). Other issues to fix include
- combined case of stack tracer and function graph tracer (common across arch's)
- exception entries (as I'm trying to address in RFC 4/4)
- in-accurate stack size (for each function, my current fix is not perfect though.)

Thanks,
-Takahiro AKASHI

Will

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