linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] kprobes - do not allow optimized kprobes in entry code

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Message-ID: <20110217152058.GB1952@jolsa.brq.redhat.com>
Date:	Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:20:58 +0100
From:	Jiri Olsa <jolsa@...hat.com>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Cc:	Masami Hiramatsu <masami.hiramatsu.pt@...achi.com>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>, ananth@...ibm.com,
	davem@...emloft.net, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] kprobes - do not allow optimized kprobes in entry code

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 04:11:03PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> * Masami Hiramatsu <masami.hiramatsu.pt@...achi.com> wrote:
> 
> > (2011/02/16 2:05), Jiri Olsa wrote:
> > > You can crash the kernel using kprobe tracer by running:
> > > 
> > > echo "p system_call_after_swapgs" > ./kprobe_events
> > > echo 1 > ./events/kprobes/enable
> > > 
> > > The reason is that at the system_call_after_swapgs label, the kernel
> > > stack is not set up. If optimized kprobes are enabled, the user space
> > > stack is being used in this case (see optimized kprobe template) and
> > > this might result in a crash.
> > > 
> > > There are several places like this over the entry code (entry_$BIT).
> > > As it seems there's no any reasonable/maintainable way to disable only
> > > those places where the stack is not ready, I switched off the whole
> > > entry code from kprobe optimizing.
> > 
> > Agreed, and this could be the best way, because kprobes can not
> > know where the kernel stack is ready without this text section.
> 
> The only worry would be that if we move the syscall entry code out of the regular 
> text section fragments the icache layout a tiny bit, possibly hurting performance.
> 
> It's probably not measurable, but we need to measure it:
> 
> Testing could be done of some syscall but also cache-intense workload, like 
> 'hackbench 10', via perf 'stat --repeat 30' and have a very close look at 
> instruction cache eviction differences.
> 
> Perhaps also explicitly enable measure one of these:
> 
>   L1-icache-loads                            [Hardware cache event]
>   L1-icache-load-misses                      [Hardware cache event]
>   L1-icache-prefetches                       [Hardware cache event]
>   L1-icache-prefetch-misses                  [Hardware cache event]
> 
>   iTLB-loads                                 [Hardware cache event]
>   iTLB-load-misses                           [Hardware cache event]
> 
> to see whether there's any statistically significant difference in icache/iTLB 
> evictions, with and without the patch.
> 
> If such stats are included in the changelog - even if just to show that any change 
> is within measurement accuracy, it would make it easier to apply this change.

ok, I'll run it 

thanks,
jirka
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