Re: [RFC] TIF_NOTIFY_RESUME, arch/*/*/*signal*.c and all such

[Roland McGrath <roland@hack.frob.com>]

> OK...  FWIW, it sounds like an argument for using it (or a function in
> kernel/signal.c that would call it) on all architectures.

That was certainly always the intent.  But I only touched myself the arch's
that I was prepared to test reasonably.

> Note that there's an extra complication on alpha and itanic - we have more
> than just struct pt_regs * there.  If we care about the rest of registers
> (struct switch_stack on alpha), we probably need to do something about that.

The presumed plan so far was just that anybody would use user_regset for
any serious tracer/debugger stuff.  That is certainly much more costly on
ia64 than passing along a few more values.  If anybody ever cares, the
tracehook functions' signatures can always be adjusted in the future.

> I wonder how alpha and itanic deal with do_coredump(), BTW - it gets
> pt_regs, but not the rest...

The expectation was that every arch would eventually switch on
CORE_DUMP_USE_REGSET.  (Looks like so far 12 do and so ~16 don't.)
Certainly avoiding the overhead of user_regset for core dumping is not
worth any new code complexity or extra arch hooks, since that overhead
even on the worst-case arch (ia64) has got to be marginal in comparison
to all the memory-copying and i/o going on.  For imagined potential
tracing/fancier-debugging cases that might be used in high-throughput
ways the question would be different, but such uses still remain to be
implemented.


Thanks,
Roland