Re: [PATCH v5 2/2] tracing: Add documentation for funcgraph-retval and graph_retval_hex

From: Donglin Peng
Date: Mon Mar 20 2023 - 23:25:02 EST


On 2023/3/21 10:31, Ding Hui wrote:
On 2023/3/20 21:16, Donglin Peng wrote:

+There are some limitations when using the funcgraph-retval currently:
+
+- Even if the function return type is void, a return value will still
+  be printed, and you can just ignore it.
+
+- Even if the return value is not an error code actually, it may be
+  displayed as an error code. You should read the code to check.
+  For example, both 0xfe and 0xfffe are be interpreted as -2.

For char and short types, displaying as signed decimal may be not appropriate, because they are rarely used to store error code.

So in "smart" mode (graph_retval_hex=0), I suggest just smart convert error value stored in int or pointer to signed decimal.

Yeah, I will remove the return value conversion for char and short
types in the "smart" mode.


+- Only the value of the first return register will be recorded and
+  printed even if the return values may be stored in two registers
+  actually. For example, both the eax and edx are used to store a
+  64 bit return value in the x86 architecture, and the eax stores
+  the low 32 bit, the edx stores the high 32 bit, however only the
+  value stored in eax will be recorded and printed.
+
  You can put some comments on specific functions by using
  trace_printk() For example, if you want to put a comment inside
  the __might_sleep() function, you just have to include