Date:	Tue, 26 Jul 2016 10:50:08 +0100
From:	Daniel Thompson <daniel.thompson@...aro.org>
To:	Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>,
	David Long <dave.long@...aro.org>
Cc:	Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@....com>,
	Petr Mladek <pmladek@...e.com>,
	Zi Shen Lim <zlim.lnx@...il.com>,
	Will Deacon <will.deacon@....com>,
	Andrey Ryabinin <ryabinin.a.a@...il.com>,
	yalin wang <yalin.wang2010@...il.com>,
	Li Bin <huawei.libin@...wei.com>,
	John Blackwood <john.blackwood@...r.com>,
	Pratyush Anand <panand@...hat.com>,
	Huang Shijie <shijie.huang@....com>,
	Dave P Martin <Dave.Martin@....com>,
	Jisheng Zhang <jszhang@...vell.com>,
	Vladimir Murzin <Vladimir.Murzin@....com>,
	Steve Capper <steve.capper@...aro.org>,
	Suzuki K Poulose <suzuki.poulose@....com>,
	Marc Zyngier <marc.zyngier@....com>,
	Yang Shi <yang.shi@...aro.org>,
	Mark Brown <broonie@...nel.org>,
	Sandeepa Prabhu <sandeepa.s.prabhu@...il.com>,
	William Cohen <wcohen@...hat.com>,
	Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@...aro.org>,
	Adam Buchbinder <adam.buchbinder@...il.com>,
	linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org,
	Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@...aro.org>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, James Morse <james.morse@....com>,
	Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@...nel.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@....com>,
	Jens Wiklander <jens.wiklander@...aro.org>,
	Christoffer Dall <christoffer.dall@...aro.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v15 04/10] arm64: Kprobes with single stepping support

On 25/07/16 18:13, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 11:51:32AM -0400, David Long wrote:
>> On 07/22/2016 06:16 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 02:33:52PM -0400, David Long wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> The document states: "Up to MAX_STACK_SIZE bytes are copied". That means
>>> the arch code could always copy less but never more than MAX_STACK_SIZE.
>>> What we are proposing is that we should try to guess how much to copy
>>> based on the FP value (caller's frame) and, if larger than
>>> MAX_STACK_SIZE, skip the probe hook entirely. I don't think this goes
>>> against the kprobes.txt document but at least it (a) may improve the
>>> performance slightly by avoiding unnecessary copy and (b) it avoids
>>> undefined behaviour if we ever encounter a jprobe with arguments passed
>>> on the stack beyond MAX_STACK_SIZE.
>>
>> OK, it sounds like an improvement. I do worry a little about unexpected side
>> effects.
>
> You get more unexpected side effects by not saving/restoring the whole
> stack. We looked into this on Friday and came to the conclusion that
> there is no safe way for kprobes to know which arguments passed on the
> stack should be preserved, at least not with the current API.
>
> Basically the AArch64 PCS states that for arguments passed on the stack
> (e.g. they can't fit in registers), the caller allocates memory for them
> (on its own stack) and passes the pointer to the callee. Unfortunately,
> the frame pointer seems to be decremented correspondingly to cover the
> arguments, so we don't really have a way to tell how much to copy.
> Copying just the caller's stack frame isn't safe either since a
> callee/caller receiving such argument on the stack may passed it down to
> a callee without copying (I couldn't find anything in the PCS stating
> that this isn't allowed).

The PCS[1] seems (at least to me) to be pretty clear that "the address 
of the first stacked argument is defined to be the initial value of SP".

I think it is only the return value (when stacked via the x8 pointer) 
that can be passed through an intermediate function in the way described 
above. Isn't it OK for a jprobe to clobber this memory? The underlying 
function will overwrite whatever the jprobe put there anyway.

Am I overlooking some additional detail in the PCS?


Daniel.


[1] Google presented me revision IHI 0055B (via infocenter.arm.com)

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