Re: [RFC PATCH 03/10] ftrace: Drop the ftrace_profile_enabled checksin tracing hot path

From: Masami Hiramatsu
Date: Mon Jan 25 2010 - 20:38:26 EST


Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> * Frederic Weisbecker (fweisbec@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 05:14:16PM -0500, Masami Hiramatsu wrote:
>>> Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 07:34:51AM -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
>>>>> * Steven Rostedt (rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, 2010-01-21 at 23:09 -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
>>>>>>> * Steven Rostedt (rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Hmm, interesting. Maybe something like that might work. But what if
>>>>>>>> CONFIG_PREEMPT is enabled but CONFIG_FREEZER is not?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Then you may want to make the function tracer depend on CONFIG_FREEZER,
>>>>>>> but maybe Masami has other ideas ?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> egad no! This is just to help add guarantees to those that use the
>>>>>> function tracer that when the tracing is disabled, it is guaranteed that
>>>>>> no more tracing will be called by the function tracer. Currently,
>>>>>> nothing relies on this. But we may add cases that might need this.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yep, identifying tracer quiescent state can become handy.
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In fact, only those that need this requirement would need to do this
>>>>>> trick. Anyway, we could make those depend on CONFIG_FREEZER, but that
>>>>>> just seems to be a strange dependency.
>>>>>
>>>>> This makes me wonder (question for Masami)...
>>>>>
>>>>> static int __kprobes check_safety(void)
>>>>> {
>>>>> int ret = 0;
>>>>> #if defined(CONFIG_PREEMPT) && defined(CONFIG_FREEZER)
>>>>> ret = freeze_processes();
>>>>> if (ret == 0) {
>>>>> struct task_struct *p, *q;
>>>>> do_each_thread(p, q) {
>>>>> if (p != current && p->state == TASK_RUNNING &&
>>>>> p->pid != 0) {
>>>>> printk("Check failed: %s is running\n",p->comm);
>>>>> ret = -1;
>>>>> goto loop_end;
>>>>> }
>>>>> } while_each_thread(p, q);
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> How does that deal with kernel threads that don't freeze?
>>>
>>> Hmm, right. It can't handle non-freezable kernel threads.
>>>
>>>> Also freezing every processes seems a bit of a heavy thing for that.
>>>> Looks like a synchronize_tasks() would be really useful.
>>>
>>> Sure :-)
>>> Maybe, I'd better remove booster support on preemptive kernel until then.
>>
>>
>> I don't know as I haven't looked deeper into check_safety(), but does the
>> fact we have non-freezable tasks break the assumptions that make
>> kprobes booster safe? If so then yeah, may be deactivate it for now.
>>
>
> In the case of check_safety, it's not a bug per se if a task happens to
> be non freezable. freeze_processes() will likely return a non-zero
> value, and the whole check_safety will therefore return that value, so
> standard breakpoints will be used instead.

Hmm, unfortunately no, because freeze_processes() doesn't count
non-freezable threads...

---
todo = 0;
read_lock(&tasklist_lock);
do_each_thread(g, p) {
if (frozen(p) || !freezeable(p))
continue;

if (!freeze_task(p, sig_only))
continue;

/*
* Now that we've done set_freeze_flag, don't
* perturb a task in TASK_STOPPED or TASK_TRACED.
* It is "frozen enough". If the task does wake
* up, it will immediately call try_to_freeze.
*/
if (!task_is_stopped_or_traced(p) &&
!freezer_should_skip(p))
todo++;
} while_each_thread(g, p);
read_unlock(&tasklist_lock);
if (!todo || time_after(jiffies, end_time))
break;
---

So, it can return 0 if there is non-freezable threads running.

Thank you,


--
Masami Hiramatsu

Software Engineer
Hitachi Computer Products (America), Inc.
Software Solutions Division

e-mail: mhiramat@xxxxxxxxxx

--
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/