arm64: ftrace: function_graph tracer not working without dynamic instrumentation

From: Julien Thierry
Date: Thu Oct 26 2017 - 04:50:21 EST


Hi,

On arm64, I noticed that when CONFIG_DYNAMIC_FTRACE is not enabled, using the function_graph tracer in ftrace alway gives empty traces.

The issues seems to be that the ftrace_trace_function is set to a function different than ftrace_stub when running mcount. If I allow mcount to continue beyond that check, I get the graph traces.

Guidelines given in Documentation/trace/ftrace-design.txt suggest that ftrace_trace_function != ftrace_stub should be checked before any function_graph related values and if the check is true then we shouldn't try to call ftrace_trace_function.

Investigating a bit more, ftrace_trace_function gets set ftrace_ops_no_ops in update_ftrace_function called when setting up the function_graph tracer.

The issue does not occur when dynamic ftrace is supported because we just replace some nops at known locations and replace them with branches.

It seemed to me that the arm64 side of things is following the guidelines in ftrace-design, so I am unsure whether it is intended that the ftrace_trace_function is not set to ftrace_stub when using the function_graph tracer.

Cheers,

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Julien Thierry