This is the first patch series of a set that will make it possible to be able to use SFrames[1] in the Linux kernel. A quick recap of the motivation for doing this.
Currently the only way to get a user space stack trace from a stack walk (and not just copying large amount of user stack into the kernel ring buffer) is to use frame pointers. This has a few issues. The biggest one is that compiling frame pointers into every application and library has been shown to cause performance overhead. Another issue is that the format of the frames may not always be consistent between different compilers and some architectures (s390) has no defined format to do a reliable stack walk. The only way to perform user space profiling on these architectures is to copy the user stack into the kernel buffer. SFrames is now supported in gcc binutils and soon will also be supported by LLVM. SFrames acts more like ORC, and lives in the ELF executable file as its own section. Like ORC it has two tables where the first table is sorted by instruction pointers (IP) and using the current IP and finding it's entry in the first table, it will take you to the second table which will tell you where the return address of the current function is located and then you can use that address to look it up in the first table to find the return address of that function, and so on. This performs a user space stack walk. Now because the SFrame section lives in the ELF file it needs to be faulted into memory when it is used. This means that walking the user space stack requires being in a faultable context. As profilers like perf request a stack trace in interrupt or NMI context, it cannot do the walking when it is requested. Instead it must be deferred until it is safe to fault in user space. One place this is known to be safe is when the task is about to return back to user space. Josh originally wrote the PoC of this code and his last version he posted was back in January: https://lore.kernel.org/all/cover.1737511963.git.jpoim...@kernel.org/ That series contained everything from adding a new faultable user space stack walking code, deferring the stack walk, implementing sframes, fixing up x86 (VDSO), and even added both the kernel and user space side of perf to make it work. But Josh also ran out of time to work on it and I picked it up. As there's several parts to this series, I also broke it out. Especially since there's parts of his series that do not depend on each other. This series contains only the core infrastructure that all the rest needs. Of the 14 patches, only 2 are x86 specific. The rest is simply the unwinding code that s390 can build against. I moved the 2 x86 specific to the end of the series too. Since multiple tracers (like perf, ftrace, bpf, etc) can attach to the deferred unwinder and each of these tracers can attach to some or all of the tasks to trace, there is a many to many relationship. This relationship needs to be made in interrupt or NMI context so it can not rely on any allocation. To handle this, a bitmask is used. There's a global bitmask of size long which will allocate a single bit when a tracer registers for deferred stack traces. The task struct will also have a bitmask where a request comes in from one of the tracers to have a deferred stack trace, it will set the corresponding bit for that tracer it its mask. As one of the bits represents that a request has been made, this means at most 31 on 32 bit systems or 63 on 64 bit systems of tracers may be registered at a given time. This should not be an issue as only one perf application, or ftrace instance should request a bit. BPF should also use only one bit and handle any multiplexing for its users. When the first request is made for a deferred stack trace from a task, it will generate a unique cookie. This cookie will be used as the identifier for the user space stack trace. As the user space stack trace does not change while the task is in the kernel, requests that come in after the first request and before the task goes back to user space will get the same cookie. If there's dropped events, and the events dropped miss a task entering user space and coming back to the kernel, the new stack trace taken when it goes back to user space should not be used with the events before the drop happened. When a tracer makes a request, it gets this cookie, and the tasks bitmask sets the bit for the requesting tracer. A task work is used to have the task do the callbacks before it goes back to user space. When it does, it will scan its bitmask and call all the callbacks for the tracers that have their representing bit set. The callback will receive the user space stack trace as well as the cookie that was used. It's up to the tracer to use the cookie or not to map the user space stack trace taken back to the events where it was requested. That's the basic idea. Obviously there's more to it than the above explanation, but each patch explains what it is doing, and it is broken up step by step. I run two SFrame meetings once a month (one in Asia friendly timezone and the other in Europe friendly). We have developers from Google, Oracle, Red Hat, IBM, EfficiOS, Meta, Microsoft, and more that attend. (If anyone is interested in attending let me know). I have been running this since December of 2024. Last year in GNU Cauldron, a few of us got together to discuss the design and such. We are pretty confident that the current design is sound. We have working code on top of this and have been testing it. Since the s390 folks want to start working on this (they have patches to sframes already from working on the prototypes), I would like this series to be a separate branch based on top of v6.16-rc2. Then all the subsystems that want to work on top of this can as there's no real dependency between them. I have more patches on top of this series that add perf support, ftrace support, sframe support and the x86 fix ups (for VDSO). But each of those patch series can be worked on independently, but they all depend on this series (although the x86 specific patches at the end isn't necessarily needed, at least for other architectures). Please review, and if you are happy with them, lets get them in a branch that we all can use. I'm happy to take it in my tree if I can get acks on the x86 code. Or it can be in the tip tree as a separate branch on top of 6.16-rc4 and I'll just base my work on top of that. Doesn't matter either way. [1] https://sourceware.org/binutils/wiki/sframe The code for this series is located here: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/trace/linux-trace.git unwind/core Changes since v12: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-trace-kernel/20250701005321.942306...@goodmis.org/ - Make unwind_user_start() and unwind_user_next() static. There's no reason that they need to be used by other files. - Move for_each_user_frame() macro into user.c - Remove extra parenthesis around start in for_each_user_frame() macro (Mathieu Desnoyers) - Added test when use_fp is true to make sure fp < sp (Jens Remus) - Make sure the address read is word aligned (Linus Torvalds) - With new alignment check, updated to handle compat mode. - Replaced the timestamp with the generated cookie logic again. Instead of using a 64 bit word where the CPU part of the cookie is just 12 bits, make it two 32 bit words, where the CPU that the cookie is generated on is one word and the second word is just a per cpu counter. This allows for just using a 32 bit cmpxchg which works on all archs that have safe NMI cmpxchg. - Now that the timestamp has been replaced by a cookie that uses only a 32 bit cmpxchg(), this code just checks if the architecture has a safe cmpxchg that can be used in NMI and doesn't do the 64 bit check. Only the pending value is converted to local_t. - Removed no longer used local.h headers from unwind_deferred_types.h Josh Poimboeuf (7): unwind_user: Add user space unwinding API unwind_user: Add frame pointer support unwind_user: Add compat mode frame pointer support unwind_user/deferred: Add unwind cache unwind_user/deferred: Add deferred unwinding interface unwind_user/x86: Enable frame pointer unwinding on x86 unwind_user/x86: Enable compat mode frame pointer unwinding on x86 Steven Rostedt (7): unwind_user/deferred: Add unwind_user_faultable() unwind_user/deferred: Make unwind deferral requests NMI-safe unwind deferred: Use bitmask to determine which callbacks to call unwind deferred: Use SRCU unwind_deferred_task_work() unwind: Clear unwind_mask on exit back to user space unwind: Add USED bit to only have one conditional on way back to user space unwind: Finish up unwind when a task exits ---- MAINTAINERS | 8 + arch/Kconfig | 11 + arch/x86/Kconfig | 2 + arch/x86/include/asm/unwind_user.h | 42 ++++ arch/x86/include/asm/unwind_user_types.h | 17 ++ arch/x86/kernel/stacktrace.c | 28 +++ include/asm-generic/Kbuild | 2 + include/asm-generic/unwind_user.h | 5 + include/asm-generic/unwind_user_types.h | 5 + include/linux/entry-common.h | 2 + include/linux/sched.h | 5 + include/linux/unwind_deferred.h | 79 +++++++ include/linux/unwind_deferred_types.h | 26 +++ include/linux/unwind_user.h | 39 ++++ include/linux/unwind_user_types.h | 39 ++++ kernel/Makefile | 1 + kernel/exit.c | 2 + kernel/fork.c | 4 + kernel/unwind/Makefile | 1 + kernel/unwind/deferred.c | 363 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ kernel/unwind/user.c | 147 +++++++++++++ 21 files changed, 828 insertions(+) create mode 100644 arch/x86/include/asm/unwind_user.h create mode 100644 arch/x86/include/asm/unwind_user_types.h create mode 100644 include/asm-generic/unwind_user.h create mode 100644 include/asm-generic/unwind_user_types.h create mode 100644 include/linux/unwind_deferred.h create mode 100644 include/linux/unwind_deferred_types.h create mode 100644 include/linux/unwind_user.h create mode 100644 include/linux/unwind_user_types.h create mode 100644 kernel/unwind/Makefile create mode 100644 kernel/unwind/deferred.c create mode 100644 kernel/unwind/user.c
