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Message-ID: <20060919175405.GC26339@Krystal>
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:54:05 -0400
From: Mathieu Desnoyers <compudj@...stal.dyndns.org>
To: Martin Bligh <mbligh@...gle.com>
Cc: prasanna@...ibm.com, Andrew Morton <akpm@...l.org>,
"Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche@...hat.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
Paul Mundt <lethal@...ux-sh.org>,
linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
Jes Sorensen <jes@....com>, Tom Zanussi <zanussi@...ibm.com>,
Richard J Moore <richardj_moore@...ibm.com>,
Michel Dagenais <michel.dagenais@...ymtl.ca>,
Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...e.de>,
Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
William Cohen <wcohen@...hat.com>, ltt-dev@...fik.org,
systemtap@...rces.redhat.com, Alan Cox <alan@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Linux Kernel Markers
* Martin Bligh (mbligh@...gle.com) wrote:
> How about we combine all three ideas together ...
>
> 1. Load modified copy of the function in question.
> 2. overwrite the first instruction of the routine with an int3 that
> does what you say (atomically)
> 3. Then overwrite the second instruction with a jump that's faster
> 4. Now atomically overwrite the int3 with a nop, and let the jump
> take over.
>
Very good idea.. However, overwriting the second instruction with a jump could
be dangerous on preemptible and SMP kernels, because we never know if a thread
has an IP in any of its contexts that would return exactly at the middle of the
jump. I think it would be doable to overwrite a 5+ bytes instruction with a NOP
non-atomically in all cases, but as the instructions nin the prologue seems to
be smaller :
prologue on x86
0: 55 push %ebp
1: 89 e5 mov %esp,%ebp
epilogue on x86
3: 5d pop %ebp
4: c3 ret
Then is can be a problem. Ideas are welcome.
Mathieu
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