Re: [tip:perfcounters/core] perf_counter: x86: Fix call-chain support to use NMI-safe methods

H. Peter Anvin
2009-06-15T22:25:14Z

Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> * H. Peter Anvin (hpa@zytor.com) wrote:
>> Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
>>> As the maintainer of the out-of-tree LTTng tracer, which hooks in the
>>> page fault handler with tracepoints, and which can build almost entirely
>>> as modules, I am very tempted to argue that having the nmi-code entirely
>>> robust wrt in-kernel page faults would be a very-nice-to-have feature.
>>>
>> I doubt that is ever going to be reliable, due to reentrancy issues.
>>
>> -hpa
>
> Do you mean the page fault handler code is no ever going to be reliable
> or the tracer code ?
>
> I spent a great deal of effort making LTTng lockless and reentrant wrt
> NMIs. It would be great if the low-level kernel exception handlers would
> do the same, therefore I would not have to isolate the tracer from the
> kernel as I currently do. Well, I would still continue to isolate the
> tracer from the kernel, but at least I would not have to spend as much
> effort controlling what exceptions and faults paths the tracer is
> executing.
>

So instead you want to core kernel to do your work for you?

-hpa