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From: Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>
To: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
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Cc: Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>,
        Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@infradead.org>,
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Subject: Re: [RFC] [PATCH 2.6.37-rc5-tip 13/20] 13: x86: x86 specific probe handling
In-Reply-To: Peter Zijlstra's message of  Thursday, 27 January 2011 11:22:13 +0100 <1296123733.15234.53.camel@laptop>
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X-Antipastobozoticataclysm: When George Bush projectile vomits antipasto on the Japanese.
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Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 11:11:46 -0800 (PST)
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> But I'll leave this to the x86 people who actually know the intricacies
> of the single step cruft, I was just wondering why you weren't using (or
> extending) the existing code.

The hairy aspects of the step.c code are hairy (and not usable at interrupt
level) because they do some instruction analysis.  Since uprobes already
does its own instruction analysis, reusing step.c's separate hacks makes
less sense to me than integrating knowledge of the single-step vs
pushf/popf issues into the uprobes instruction analysis.

That said, there is further nontriviality just to do with the block-step
support and with not clobbering user-visible usage of TF in eflags, which
uprobes needs to handle as well.  It makes sense to share that code rather
than repeating it, even if that entails changes to the step.c code.


Thanks,
Roland