On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 01:50:26PM +0900, Masami Hiramatsu wrote:
...
> > Side question: there are certain symbols in arch/x86/xen that should be
> > blacklisted explicitly, because they're non-attachable.
> >
> > More exactly, all functions defined in arch/x86/xen/spinlock.c,
> > arch/x86/xen/time.c and arch/x86/xen/irq.c.
> >
> > The reason is that these files are compiled without -pg to allow the
> > usage of ftrace within a Xen domain apparently (from
> > arch/x86/xen/Makefile):
> >
> > ifdef CONFIG_FUNCTION_TRACER
> > # Do not profile debug and lowlevel utilities
> > CFLAGS_REMOVE_spinlock.o = -pg
> > CFLAGS_REMOVE_time.o = -pg
> > CFLAGS_REMOVE_irq.o = -pg
> > endif
>
>
> Actually, the reason why you can not probe those functions via
> tracing/kprobe_events is just a side effect. You can probe it if you
> write a kprobe module. Since the kprobe_events depends on some ftrace
> tracing functions, it sometimes cause a recursive call problem. To avoid
> this issue, I have introduced a CONFIG_KPROBE_EVENTS_ON_NOTRACE, see
> commit 45408c4f9250 ("tracing: kprobes: Prohibit probing on notrace
> function").
>
> If you set CONFIG_KPROBE_EVENTS_ON_NOTRACE=n, you can continue putting probes
> on Xen spinlock functions too.
OK.
>
> > Do you see a nice and clean way to blacklist all these functions
> > (something like arch_populate_kprobe_blacklist()), or should we just
> > flag all of them explicitly with NOKPROBE_SYMBOL()?
>
> As I pointed, you can probe it via your own kprobe module. Like systemtap,
> you still can probe it. The blacklist is for "kprobes", not for
> "kprobe_events".
> (Those are used to same, but since the above commit, those are different now)
>
> I think the most sane solution is, identifying which (combination of)
> functions
> in ftrace (kernel/trace/*) causes a problem, marking those NOKPROBE_SYMBOL()
> and
> removing CONFIG_KPROBE_EVENTS_ON_NOTRACE.
OK. Thanks for the clarification!
-Andrea
