Re: [PATCH v3 perf, bpf-next 1/4] perf, bpf: Introduce PERF_RECORD_BPF_EVENT

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Thu Dec 13 2018 - 13:46:00 EST


On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 01:33:20PM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Dec 2018 19:05:53 +0100
> Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 05:09:17PM +0000, Song Liu wrote:
> > > > And while this tracks the bpf kallsyms, it does not do all kallsyms.
> > > >
> > > > .... Oooh, I see the problem, everybody is doing their own custom
> > > > kallsym_{add,del}() thing, instead of having that in generic code :-(
> > > >
> > > > This, for example, doesn't track module load/unload nor ftrace
> > > > trampolines, even though both affect kallsyms.
> > >
> > > I think we can use PERF_RECORD_MMAP(or MMAP2) for module load/unload.
> > > That could be separate sets of patches.
> >
> > So I would actually like to move bpf_lock/bpf_kallsyms/bpf_tree +
> > bpf_prog_kallsyms_*() + __bpf_address_lookup() into kernel/kallsyms.c
> > and also have ftrace use that.
> >
> > Because currently the ftrace stuff is otherwise invisible.
> >
> > A generic kallsym register/unregister for any JIT.
>
> That's if it needs to look up the symbols that were recorded when init
> was unloaded.
>
> The ftrace kallsyms is used to save the function names of init code
> that was freed, but may have been recorded. With out the ftrace
> kallsyms the functions traced at init time would just show up as hex
> addresses (not very useful).
>
> I'm not sure how BPF would need those symbols unless they were executed
> during init (module or core) and needed to see what the symbols use to
> be).

Aah, that sounds entirely dodgy and possibly quite broken. We freed that
init code, so BPF or your trampolines (or a tiny module) could actually
fit in there and insert their own kallsyms, and then we have overlapping
symbols, which would be pretty bad.

I thought the ftrace kallsym stuff was for the trampolines, which would
be fairly similar to what BPF is doing. And why I'm trying to get a
generic dynamic kallsym thing sorted. There's bound the be other
code-gen things at some point.