Re: [PATCH v3] pstore/ftrace: Convert to its own enable/disabledebugfs knob

[Steven Rostedt]

On Tue, 2012-08-21 at 19:10 -0700, Anton Vorontsov wrote:

> Running without any recursion protection is prone to weird
> lockups/reboots, and probably a good idea to have it on a production
> system. But recursion during tracing is still an evidence of some other
> bugs, right? At least the fact that I didn't have it helped me to find a
> bug. So, does it make sense to make the recursion protection optionally
> disabled? Maybe as some CONFIG_DEBUG_* option (briefly looking into
> kernel/trace/Kconfig I didn't find any)?

The problem is that recursion bugs are usually due to calling something
that might be traced. Really, I've hit so many recursion bugs, that
having the protection is probably the best thing. I wouldn't turn it
off.

The worse that recursion can do (with proper protection) is that it
causes a little wasted effort during the trace (it wastes cycles tracing
something again and then recognizing that it is doing it due to
recursion).

Therefore, the 'notrace' annotations are mostly for speed up (don't
trace this while tracing, because the tracer uses it too).

-- Steve


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