Re: [PATCH v5 2/3] net: add kcov handle to skb extensions

[Johannes Berg]

On Sat, 2020-11-21 at 12:55 -0800, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> [snip]
> Ack, you have to figure out all the places anyway, the question is
> whether you put probes there or calls in the source code.
> 
> Shifting the maintenance burden but also BPF is flexibility.

Yeah, true. Though I'd argue also visibility - this stuff is pretty
simple now, if it gets into lots of lines of BPF code to track it that
is maintained "elsewhere", we won't see the bugs in it :-)

And it's kinda a thing that we as kernel developers _should_ be the ones
looking at since it's testing our code.

> Yup, the point is you can feed a raw skb pointer (and all other
> possible context you may want) to a BPF prog in kcov_remote_start() 
> and let BPF/BTF give you the handle it recorded in its maps.

Yeah, it's possible. Personally, I don't think it's worth the
complexity.

> It is more complicated. We can go back to an skb field if this work is
> expected to yield results for mac80211. Would you mind sending a patch?

I can do that, but I'm not going to be able to do it now/tonight (GMT+1
here), so probably only Monday/Tuesday or so, sorry.

johannes