From: Jim Keniston <jkenisto@us.ibm.com>
To: David Smith <dsmith@redhat.com>
Cc: Rajasekhar Duddu <rajduddu@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
systemtap@sources.redhat.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] Tracepoint Tapset for Memory Subsystem
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:12:00 -0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1254161548.5107.14.camel@localhost.localdomain> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4ABD17B5.6080500@redhat.com>
On Fri, 2009-09-25 at 14:19 -0500, David Smith wrote:
...
>
> Sorry to keep finding more things, but...
>
> I'm a bit worried about your use of '__builtin_return_address()' here.
> Jim Keniston reported on it back in 2005 in the following message, but
> there isn't much context.
>
> <http://sourceware.org/ml/systemtap/2005-q2/msg00242.html>
>
> Jim, can you remember some context here? Was the use of
> '__builtin_return_address' considered good/bad/neutral? We don't seem
> to use it anywhere else.
>
In case anybody still cares...
The context was that we had recently implemented kretprobes, and
somebody pointed out that hijacking the return address would cause
__builtin_return_address() to return the wrong value. From my survey of
the kernel, I concluded that "__builtin_return_address is used entirely
for tracing (tracing that is disabled by default), profiling, and error
reporting. I couldn't find any case where normal operation of the OS
would be affected."
Ironically, soon after that, kprobes itself started using
__builtin_return_address().
Anyway, there was no controversy as to whether
__builtin_return_address() was bad or good per se; it was simply
recognized that it would return invalid results when called from a
return-probed function.
Jim
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-09-28 18:12 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 18+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-09-19 5:01 [PATCH] " Rajasekhar Duddu
2009-09-22 17:39 ` David Smith
2009-09-22 21:23 ` Frank Ch. Eigler
2009-09-22 22:05 ` David Smith
2009-09-24 18:08 ` [PATCH v2] " Rajasekhar Duddu
2009-09-25 19:19 ` David Smith
2009-09-25 20:07 ` Frank Ch. Eigler
2009-09-28 18:12 ` Jim Keniston [this message]
2009-09-29 8:58 ` K.Prasad
2009-09-25 21:50 ` Josh Stone
2009-09-30 10:12 ` Rajasekhar Duddu
2009-10-02 15:14 ` [PATCH v3] " Rajasekhar Duddu
2009-10-06 19:01 ` Frank Ch. Eigler
2009-10-07 13:07 ` Rajasekhar Duddu
2009-10-07 19:51 ` Frank Ch. Eigler
2009-10-09 17:08 ` Rajasekhar Duddu
2009-10-09 17:38 ` Frank Ch. Eigler
2009-10-14 8:32 ` Rajasekhar Duddu
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=1254161548.5107.14.camel@localhost.localdomain \
--to=jkenisto@us.ibm.com \
--cc=dsmith@redhat.com \
--cc=rajduddu@linux.vnet.ibm.com \
--cc=systemtap@sources.redhat.com \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).