Re: [RFC PATCH 0/7] Early task context tracking

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 5:47 AM Daniel Bristot de Oliveira
<bristot@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 4/4/19 2:01 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> >> To resolve this problem, the set/unset of the IRQ/NMI context needs to
> >> be done before the execution of the first C execution, and after its
> >> return. By doing so, and using this method to identify the context in the
> >> trace recursion protection, no more events are lost.
> > I would much rather do the opposite: completely remove context
> > tracking from the asm and, instead, stick it into the C code.  We'd
> > need to make sure that the C code is totally immune from tracing,
> > kprobes, etc, but it would be a nice cleanup.  And then you could fix
> > this bug in C!
> >
> >
>
> Humm... what we could do to have things in C is to set the variable right at the
> begin of the C handler, e.g., do_IRQ(), and right before the return.
>
> But by doing this we would have a problem with two things:
>
> 1) irq handler itself (e.g., do_IRQ())
> 2) functions/tracepoints that might run before and after the handler execution
> (e.g., preemptirq tracer), but still in the IRQ context.
>
> We can work around the first case by checking if (the function is in the
> __irq_entry .text section) in the recursion control.
>
> The second case would still be a problem. For instance, the preemptirq:
> tracepoints in the preemptirq tracer would be "dropped" in the case of a
> miss-identification of a recursion.
>
> Thinking aloud: should we try to move the preemptirq tracers to the C part?


I think we should try to move as much as possible to the C part.