Re: [PATCH v2] arm64: Store breakpoint single step state into pstate

From: Wangnan (F)
Date: Mon Jan 18 2016 - 06:40:50 EST




On 2016/1/13 1:06, Will Deacon wrote:
On Tue, Jan 05, 2016 at 01:06:15PM +0800, Wangnan (F) wrote:
On 2016/1/5 0:55, Will Deacon wrote:
The problem seems to be that we take the debug exception before the
breakpointed instruction has been executed and call perf_bp_event at
that moment, so when we single-step the faulting instruction we actually
step into the SIGIO handler and end up getting stuck.

Your fix doesn't really address this afaict, in that you don't (can't?)
handle:

* A longjmp out of a signal handler
* A watchpoint and a breakpoint that fire on the same instruction
* User-controlled single-step from a signal handler that enables a
breakpoint explicitly
* Nested signals
Please have a look at [1], which I improve test__bp_signal() to
check bullet 2 and 4 you mentioned above. Seems my fix is correct.

[1] http://lkml.kernel.org/g/1451969880-14877-1-git-send-email-wangnan0@xxxxxxxxxx
I'm still really uneasy about this change. Pairing up the signal delivery
with the sigreturn to keep track of the debug state is extremely fragile
and I'm not keen on adding this logic there. I also think we need to
track the address that the breakpoint is originally taken on so that we
can only perform the extra sigreturn work if we're returning to the same
instruction. Furthermore, I wouldn't want to do this for signals other
than those generated directly by a breakpoint.

An alternative would be to postpone the signal delivery until after the
stepping has been taken care of, but that's a change in ABI and I worry
we'll break somebody relying on the current behaviour.

What exactly does x86 do? I couldn't figure it out from the code.

Actually x86 does similar thing as what this patch does.

RF bit in x86_64's eflags prohibit debug exception raises. It is set by
x86_64's debug handler to avoid recursion. x86_64 need setting this bit
in breakpoint handler because it needs to jump back to original
instruction and single-step on it, similar to ARM64.

The RF bit in eflags records a state that the process shouldn't generate
debug exception. It is part of the state of a process, and should be saved
and cleared if transfers to signal handler.

This patch does the same thing: create two bits in pstate to indicate
the states that 'a process should not raises watchpoint/breakpoint exceptions',
maintains them in kernel, cleans them for signal handler and save them in signal
frame.

Thank you.