Re: Task watchers v2

Christoph Hellwig
2006-12-15T08:34:14Z

On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 04:07:55PM -0800, Matt Helsley wrote:
> Associate function calls with significant events in a task's lifetime much like
> we handle kernel and module init/exit functions. This creates a table for each
> of the following events in the task_watchers_table ELF section:
>
> WATCH_TASK_INIT at the beginning of a fork/clone system call when the
> new task struct first becomes available.
>
> WATCH_TASK_CLONE just before returning successfully from a fork/clone.
>
> WATCH_TASK_EXEC just before successfully returning from the exec
> system call.
>
> WATCH_TASK_UID every time a task's real or effective user id changes.
>
> WATCH_TASK_GID every time a task's real or effective group id changes.
>
> WATCH_TASK_EXIT at the beginning of do_exit when a task is exiting
> for any reason.
>
> WATCH_TASK_FREE is called before critical task structures like
> the mm_struct become inaccessible and the task is subsequently freed.
>
> The next patch will add a debugfs interface for measuring fork and exit rates
> which can be used to calculate the overhead of the task watcher infrastructure.

What's the point of the ELF hackery? This code would be a lot simpler
and more understandable if you simply had task_watcher_ops and a
register / unregister function for it.