>>>>> On Fri, 29 Mar 2002 16:06:18 +0000, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> said:
Christoph> On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 07:46:07AM -0800, David Mosberger
Christoph> wrote:
>> Christoph, why do you think the prototype for ia64 is different?
Christoph> I have stopped to wonder why ia64 does things
Christoph> differently.
You might want to reconsider that stance. It could open your mind. ;-)
BTW: this is not at all an ia64-specific issue. It applies to any
arch that doesn't maintain a frame pointer on the stack. Basic
compiler technology.
>> It's because it *has to be*. In general, you can't do a
>> backtrace without having the full (preserved) state of the CPU at
>> the point of which the backtrace begins.
Christoph> So your suggestion is to move the other architectures to
Christoph> the ia64 prototype or to not have an
Christoph> architecture-independand stack-traceback facility at all?
I haven't done such an investigation. I believe the ia64 prototype is
reasonable and probably implementable on all platforms that can unwind
the stack in the first place, but before making a change to the stable
kernel API, I'd think someone would have to investigate this a bit
further.
One issue to consider is whether it's safe to call the routine on a
task that is running on another processor. The ia64 implementation
can handle this gracefully, because it's sometimes better to print a
meaningless (garbled) stack trace than to make provably certain that
the task won't be running on any other CPU. A related question is
whether the routine can be called with interrupts masked.
My sense is this is something that should be considered for 2.5 first.
--david
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