linux-kernel - Re: [tip:perfcounters/core] perf_counter: x86: Fix call-chain support to use NMI-safe methods

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Message-ID: <20090615213429.GD12919@Krystal>
Date:	Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:34:29 -0400
From:	Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@...ymtl.ca>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Cc:	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	mingo@...hat.com, paulus@...ba.org, acme@...hat.com,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, penberg@...helsinki.fi,
	vegard.nossum@...il.com, efault@....de, jeremy@...p.org,
	npiggin@...e.de, tglx@...utronix.de,
	linux-tip-commits@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [tip:perfcounters/core] perf_counter: x86: Fix call-chain
	support to use NMI-safe methods

* Ingo Molnar (mingo@...e.hu) wrote:
> 
> * Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@...ymtl.ca> wrote:
> 
> > Just for the sake of making NMI handlers less tricky, supporting 
> > page faults caused by faulting kernel instructions (rather than 
> > only supporting explicit faulting from get_user_pages_inatomic) 
> > would be rather nice design-wise if it only costs 2-3 cycles.
> > 
> > And I would not want to touch the page fault handler itself to 
> > write the saved cr2 value before the handler exits, because this 
> > would add a branch on a very hot path.
> 
> _That_ path is not hot at all - it's the 'we are in atomic section 
> and faulted' rare path (laced with an exception table search - which 
> is extremely slow compared to other bits of the pagefault path).
> 
> But ... it's not an issue: a check can be made in the NMI code too, 
> as we always know about pagefaults there, by virtue of getting 
> -EFAULT back from the attempted-user-copy.

As the maintainer of the out-of-tree LTTng tracer, which hooks in the
page fault handler with tracepoints, and which can build almost entirely
as modules, I am very tempted to argue that having the nmi-code entirely
robust wrt in-kernel page faults would be a very-nice-to-have feature.

Requiring that code to be either built-in or to call vmalloc_sync_all()
after any vmalloc or after module load is just painful and error-prone.
Plus, tracing is a feature that some users will only use in specific
occasions. I don't see why it should be built-into the kernel at all.
That's just a waste of memory in many cases. (I am not talking about
users who want to do continuous system tracing here, which is a totally
different scenario).

Mathieu


> 
> 	Ingo

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F  BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68
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