On Sun, May 20, 2018 at 11:28:43AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote: > > [ Steve interrupts his time off ]
Hope you're enjoying your vacation :) > On Sat, 19 May 2018 17:49:38 -0700 > "Paul E. McKenney" <paul...@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote: > > > I suggested to Steven that the rcu_read_lock() and rcu_read_unlock() might > > be outside of the trampoline, but this turned out to be infeasible. Not > > that I remember why! ;-) > > Because the trampoline itself is what needs to be freed. The trampoline > is what mcount/fentry or an optimized kprobe jumps to. > > > <func>: > nop > > [ enable function tracing ] > > <func>: > call func_tramp --> set up stack > call function_tracer() > pop stack > ret > > ^^^^^ > This is the trampoline > > There's no way to know when a task will be on the trampoline or not. > The trampoline is allocated, and we need RCU_tasks to know when we can > free it. The only way to make a "wrapper" is to modify more of the code > text to do whatever before calling the trampoline, which is > impractical. > > The allocated trampolines were added as an optimization, where two > registered callback functions from ftrace that are attached to two > different functions don't call the same trampoline which would have to > do a loop and a hash lookup to know what callback to call per function. > If a callback is the only one attached to a specific function, then a > trampoline is allocated and will call that callback directly, keeping > the overhead down. Right, I saw your trampoline prototype tree. I understand how it works now, thanks. > There is no feasible way to know when a task is on a trampoline > without adding overhead that negates the speed up we receive by making > individual trampolines to begin with. Are you speaking of time overhead or space overhead, or both? Just thinking out loud and probably some food for thought.. The rcu_read_lock/unlock primitive are extrememly fast, so I don't personally think there's a time hit. Could we get around the trampoline code == data issue by say using a multi-stage trampoline like so? : call func_tramp --> (static trampoline) (dynamic trampoline) rcu_read_lock() -------> set up stack call function_tracer() pop stack rcu_read_unlock() <------ ret I know there's probably more to it than this, but conceptually atleast, it feels like all the RCU infrastructure is already there to handle preemption within a trampoline and it would be cool if the trampoline were as shown above for the dynamically allocated trampolines. Atleast I feel it will be faster than the pre-trampoline code that did the hash lookups / matching to call the right function callbacks, and could help eliminiate need for the RCU-tasks subsystem and its kthread then. If you still feel its nots worth it, then that's okay too and clearly the RCU-tasks has benefits such as a simpler trampoline implementation.. thanks! - Joel