Re: [PATCH v2 0/6] ftrace: to kill a daemon (small updates)

From: Gregory Haskins
Date: Fri Aug 15 2008 - 07:25:29 EST


(From the original mail)

Steven Rostedt wrote:

Along came Gregory Haskins, who was bickering about having ftrace enabled
on a production -rt kernel. I told him the reasons that this would be bad
and then he started thinking out loud, and suggesting wild ideas, like
patching gcc!
^^^^^^^^^^

Ingo Molnar wrote:
Eventually gcc should be extended to provide a separate section for instrumentation patch sites, instead of us having to disassemble the object code.

:)

I obviously agree with this, so +1

Though, tbh, at the time I suggested it I didn't think of Steve's idea to post-process which was quite clever. But I do agree that having gcc do it will probably save some build time since it will probably be trivial for it to do this when already processing -pg. It would have the added benefit of letting the arch specific toolchain do the arch specific work (though I think Steve's solution capitalizes on the toolchain extensively as it is).

The biggest downside is that we would have an external dependency on gcc for the feature, but I guess the kernel already has some of those anyway (e.g. the stack overflow guard feature, etc). We could always fall back on Steve's post-processing if the toolchain lacks the feature.

-Greg

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