Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] arm64: Implement reliable stack trace

[Mark Rutland]

Hi Josh,

On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 04:29:31PM -0500, Josh Poimboeuf wrote:
> > > AFAICT, existing architectures don't always handle all of the above in
> > > arch_stack_walk_reliable(). For example, it looks like x86 assumes
> > > unwiding through exceptions is reliable for !CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER, but I
> > > think this might not always be true.
> 
> Why not?

Mark B's reply dropped this, but the next paragraph covered that:

| I was planning to send a mail once I've finished writing a test, but
| IIUC there are some windows where ftrace/kretprobes
| detection/repainting may not work, e.g. if preempted after
| ftrace_return_to_handler() decrements curr_ret_stack, but before the
| arch trampoline asm restores the original return addr. So we might
| need something like an in_return_trampoline() to detect and report
| that reliably.

... so e.g. for a callchain A->B->C, where C is instrumented there are
windows where B might be missing from the trace, but the trace is
reported as reliable.

I'll start a new thread on this (with a more fleshed-out example), with
the full set of livepatch folk, lkml, etc. I just want to write a test
case first, since it's entirely possible something I've missed is
catching this already.

Thanks,
Mark.