Re: questions on struct sigcontext

[Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org>]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 11:44:14AM -0600, Chris Friesen wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> First, I'm not subscribed to the list so I'd appreciate being cc'd on any 
> replies.
>
> We have a project getting started with MIPS, and one of the things that  
> we're trying to bring in is some exception-handling code that logs  
> various information about the ways that apps fail.
>
> In particular, the guys working on this have asked for the STATUS, CAUSE, 
> BADVADDR, and FPC_EIR registers to be made available as part of struct 
> sigcontext so that they can determine exactly why the app is failing.
>
> Looking at include/asm-mips/sigcontext.h I can see that these registers  
> appear to be in the struct, but are either marked as "unused" or now have 
> different names.
>
> Am I correct that these registers are not currently exported to userspace 
> on a fault?  If this is the case, why not?  Does anyone have a patch to 
> enable this export?

There used to be slots for badvaddr and cause.  You'll have to ask
Ralf why he decided to clobber them for DSP state, I don't remember
:-)  I suspect they may never have held useful information for you;
we don't context switch them for userspace, so an intervening fault
in kernel space or in another thread could change them.

FPC_EIR is, unless I misremember, constant and read only.  You can
just read it.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery