This is something I wanted to implement a long time ago, but held off until there was a good reason to do so. Now it appears that having access to the arguments of the function by default is very useful. As a bonus, because arguments must be saved regardless before calling a callback, because they need to be restored before returning back to the start of the traced function, there's not much work to do to have them always be there for normal function callbacks.
The basic idea is that if CONFIG_HAVE_DYNAMIC_FTRACE_WITH_ARGS is set, then all callbacks registered to ftrace can use the regs parameter for the stack and arguments (kernel_stack_pointer(regs), regs_get_kernel_argument(regs, n)), without the need to set REGS that causes overhead by saving all registers as REGS simulates a breakpoint. This could be extended to move the REGS portion to kprobes itself, and remove the SAVE_REGS flag completely, but for now, kprobes still uses the full SAVE_REGS support. The last patch extends the WITH_ARGS to allow default function tracing to modify the instruction pointer, where livepatching for x86 no longer needs to save all registers. The idea of this approach is to give enough information to a callback that it could retrieve all arguments, which includes the stack pointer and instruction pointer. This can also be extended to modify the function graph tracer to use the function tracer instead of having a separate trampoline. Changes since v3: Have live patching depend on HAVE_DYNAMIC_FTRACE_WITH_REGS *or* HAVE_DYNAMIC_FTRACE_WITH_ARGS Steven Rostedt (VMware) (3): ftrace: Have the callbacks receive a struct ftrace_regs instead of pt_regs ftrace/x86: Allow for arguments to be passed in to ftrace_regs by default livepatch: Use the default ftrace_ops instead of REGS when ARGS is available ---- arch/powerpc/include/asm/livepatch.h | 4 +++- arch/s390/include/asm/livepatch.h | 5 ++++- arch/x86/Kconfig | 1 + arch/x86/include/asm/ftrace.h | 18 ++++++++++++++++++ arch/x86/include/asm/livepatch.h | 4 ++-- arch/x86/kernel/ftrace_64.S | 15 +++++++++++++-- arch/x86/kernel/kprobes/ftrace.c | 3 ++- include/linux/ftrace.h | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++-- include/linux/kprobes.h | 2 +- kernel/livepatch/Kconfig | 2 +- kernel/livepatch/patch.c | 10 ++++++---- kernel/trace/Kconfig | 9 +++++++++ kernel/trace/ftrace.c | 27 +++++++++++++++------------ kernel/trace/trace_event_perf.c | 2 +- kernel/trace/trace_functions.c | 9 ++++----- kernel/trace/trace_irqsoff.c | 2 +- kernel/trace/trace_sched_wakeup.c | 2 +- kernel/trace/trace_selftest.c | 20 +++++++++++--------- kernel/trace/trace_stack.c | 2 +- 19 files changed, 120 insertions(+), 45 deletions(-)