On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 07:44:10AM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote: > On Sat, 30 Jan 2021 09:28:32 +0100 > Peter Zijlstra <pet...@infradead.org> wrote: > > > On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 04:24:54PM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote: > > > Specifically, kprobe and ftrace callbacks may have this: > > > > > > if (in_nmi()) > > > return; > > > > > > raw_spin_lock_irqsave(&lock, flags); > > > [..] > > > raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore(&lock, flags); > > > > > > Which is totally fine to have, > > > > Why? There's a distinct lack of explaining here. > > > > Note that we ripped out all such dodgy locking from kretprobes. > > Actually, I think you helped explain the distinction. You mention > "kretpobes" do you mean the infrastructure of kretprobes or all its > users?
kretprobe infra. > The infrastructure of ftrace and kprobes can work in any context, it > does not mean that the callbacks must. Again, these are more like > exceptions. Why have "in_nmi()"? If anything that can be called by an > NMI should just work, right? That's basically your argument for having > ftrace and kprobes set "in_nmi". > > You can have locking in NMIs if the locking is *only* in NMI handlers, > right? If that's the case, then so should ftrace and kprobe callbacks. Which is still dodgy as heck. NMIs _can_ nest. Now mostly it doesn't happen, and the few sites that do use spinlocks from NMI context are sure to use it from a specific NMI 'handler' context which typically don't nest. But I still utterly detest the idea of using spinlocks from NMI. It's inherently fragile. > The stack tracer checks the size of the stack, compares it to the > largest recorded size, and if it's bigger, it will save the stack. But > if this happens on two CPUs at the same time, only one can do the > recording at the same time. To synchronize this, a spin lock must be > taken. Similar to spin locks in an NMI. That sounds like something cmpxchg() should be able to do. Have a per-cpu stack trace buffer and a global max one, when cpu local exceeds previous max, cmpxchg the buffer. > But the problem here is, the callbacks can also be done from an NMI > context, so if we are in NMI, we don't want to take any locks, and > simply don't record the stack traces from NMIs. Which is obviously shit :-) The NMI might have interesting stack usage. > The more I think about it, the more I hate the idea that ftrace > callbacks and kprobes are considered NMIs. Simply because they are not! Yet they happen when IRQs are off, so they are ;-) Also, given how everything can nest, it had better all be lockless anyway. You can get your regular function trace interrupted, which can hit a #DB, which can function trace, which can #BP which can function trace again which can get #NMI etc.. Many wonderfun nestings possible. And god knows what these handlers end up calling. The only sane approach is treating it all as NMI and having it all lockless.
