Re: [PATCH v1] powerpc: Include running function as first entry in save_stack_trace() and friends

Mark Rutland
2021-03-05T12:06:17Z

On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 08:01:29PM +0100, Marco Elver wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Mar 2021 at 19:51, Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 07:22:53PM +0100, Marco Elver wrote:

> > > I was having this problem with KCSAN, where the compiler would
> > > tail-call-optimize __tsan_X instrumentation.
> >
> > Those are compiler-generated calls, right? When those are generated the
> > compilation unit (and whatever it has included) might not have provided
> > a prototype anyway, and the compiler has special knowledge of the
> > functions, so it feels like the compiler would need to inhibit TCO here
> > for this to be robust. For their intended usage subjecting them to TCO
> > doesn't seem to make sense AFAICT.
> >
> > I suspect that compilers have some way of handling that; otherwise I'd
> > expect to have heard stories of mcount/fentry calls getting TCO'd and
> > causing problems. So maybe there's an easy fix there?
>
> I agree, the compiler builtins should be handled by the compiler
> directly, perhaps that was a bad example. But we also have "explicit
> instrumentation", e.g. everything that's in <linux/instrumented.h>.

True -- I agree for those we want similar, and can see a case for a
no-tco-calls-to-me attribute on functions as with noreturn.

Maybe for now it's worth adding prevent_tail_call_optimization() to the
instrument_*() call wrappers in <linux/instrumented.h>? As those are
__always_inline, that should keep the function they get inlined in
around. Though we probably want to see if we can replace the mb() in
prevent_tail_call_optimization() with something that doesn't require a
real CPU barrier.

[...]

> > I reckon for basically any instrumentation we don't want calls to be
> > TCO'd, though I'm not immediately sure of cases beyond sanitizers and
> > mcount/fentry.
>
> Thinking about this more, I think it's all debugging tools. E.g.
> lockdep, if you lock/unlock at the end of a function, you might tail
> call into lockdep. If the compiler applies TCO, and lockdep determines
> there's a bug and then shows a trace, you'll have no idea where the
> actual bug is. The kernel has lots of debugging facilities that add
> instrumentation in this way. So perhaps it's a general debugging-tool
> problem (rather than just sanitizers).

This makes sense to me.

Thanks,
Mark.