Re: [PATCH v3 00/10] x86: ORC unwinder (previously undwarf)

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 09:12:53AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 05:32:25PM -0500, Josh Poimboeuf wrote:
> > If you want perf to be able to use ORC instead of DWARF for user space
> > binaries, that's not currently possible, though I don't see any
> > technical blockers for doing so.  Perf would need to be taught to read
> > ORC data.
> 
> So the problem with userspace stuff is that the unwind data isn't
> readily available from NMI context.
> 
> So the kernel unwinder will trigger a fault and abort.
> 
> The very best we can hope for is using the EH [*] stuff that all
> binaries actually have _and_ map. The only problem is that most programs
> don't actually use the EH stuff much so while its mapped, its not
> actually paged in, so we're still stuck.

One gloriously ugly hack would be to delay the userspace unwind to
return-to-userspace, at which point we have a schedulable context and
can take faults.

Of course, then you have to somehow identify this later unwind sample
with all relevant prior samples and stitch the whole thing back
together, but that should be doable.

In fact, it would be at all hard to do, just queue a task_work from the
NMI and have that do the EH based unwind.