Re: Cannot unwind through MIPS signal frames with ICACHE_REFILLS_WORKAROUND_WAR

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 11:48:53AM +0000, Andrew Haley wrote:

> David Daney writes:
>  > With the current kernel (2.6.23.1) in my R5000 based O2 it seems 
>  > impossible for GCC's exception unwinding machinery to unwind through 
>  > signal frames.  The cause of the problems is the 
>  > ICACHE_REFILLS_WORKAROUND_WAR which puts the sigcontext at an almost 
>  > impossible to determine offset from the signal return trampoline.  The 
>  > unwinder depends on being able to find the sigcontext given a known 
>  > location of the trampoline.
>  > 
>  > It seems there are a couple of possible solutions:
>  > 
>  > 1) The comments in war.h indicate the problem only exists in R7000
>  > and E9000 processors.  We could turn off the workaround if the
>  > kernel is configured for R5000.  That would help me, but not those
>  > with the effected systems.
>  > 
>  > 2) In the non-workaround case, the siginfo immediately follows the
>  > trampoline and the first member is the signal number.  For the
>  > workaround case the first word following the trampoline is zero.
>  > We could replace this with the offset to the sigcontext which is
>  > always a small negative value.  The unwinder could then distinguish
>  > the two cases (signal numbers are positive and the offset
>  > negative).  If we did this, the change would have to be coordinated
>  > with GCC's unwinder (in libgcc_s.so.1).
>  > 
>  > Thoughts?
> 
> The best solution is to put the unwinder info in the kernel.  Does
> MIPS use a vDSO ?

No though we should.

Another reason is to get rid of the classic trampoline the kernel installs
on the stack.  On some multiprocessor systems it requires a cacheflush
operation to be performed on all processors which is expensive.  Having
the trampoline in a vDSO would solve that.

I need to look into it, not sure what it would take.

  Ralf