Re: [uml-devel] [RFC] PATCH 3/4 - Time virtualization : PTRACE_SYSCALL_MASK

From: Heiko Carstens
Date: Sat Apr 29 2006 - 04:48:59 EST


> Ok, this gives us a definite proposal, which I finally like:
>
> * to exclude sys_tee:
>
> bitmask = 0;
> set_bit(__NR_tee, bitmask);
> ptrace(PTRACE_SET_NOTRACE, bitmask);
>
> * to trace only sys_tee:
>
> bitmask = 0;
> set_bit(__NR_tee, bitmask);
> ptrace(PTRACE_SET_TRACEONLY, bitmask);
>
> Semantics:
>
> in both cases, the mask is first zero-extended to the right (for syscalls not
> known to userspace), bits for syscall not known to the kernel are checked and
> the call fails if any of them is 1, and in the failure case E2BIG or
> EOVERFLOW is returned (I want to avoid EINVAL and ENOSYS to avoid confusion)
> and the part of the mask known to the kernel is 0-ed.
>
> In case of success, for NOTRACE (which was DEFAULT_TRACE) the mask is reversed
> before copying in the kernel syscall mask, for TRACEONLY it's copied there
> directly.

IMHO this is way too complicated. Introducing a ptrace call that returns
the number of syscalls and forcing user space to pass a complete bitmask
is much easier. Also the semantics are much easier to understand.

In addition your proposal would already introduce a rather complicated
interface to figure out how many syscalls the kernel has. I'm sure this
will be (mis)used sooner or later.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/