From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756054AbYHODA6 (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:00:58 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752623AbYHODAt (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:00:49 -0400 Received: from hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com ([71.74.56.124]:40083 "EHLO hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752191AbYHODAt (ORCPT ); Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:00:49 -0400 Message-Id: <20080815024716.480118113@goodmis.org> User-Agent: quilt/0.46-1 Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:47:16 -0400 From: Steven Rostedt To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Cc: Ingo Molnar , Thomas Gleixner , Peter Zijlstra , Andrew Morton , Linus Torvalds , David Miller , Mathieu Desnoyers , Gregory Haskins , Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo , "Luis Claudio R. Goncalves" , Clark Williams , srostedt@redhat.com Subject: [PATCH 0/3] ftrace: handle kernel code remove Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org The dynamic ftrace feature keeps a table of all the places that call mcount to either disable them (replacing them with nops) or to enable them (calling some trace function). This table of functions is also displayed to the user interface to let users enable or disable specific functions. This allows users to only trace some functions within the kernel. When a module or init sections are removed, the pointers to their locations still exist in this table. To protect against faults and writing over other text, fault handling and code comparing is done. When the code is update, the code being replaced is calculated and compared to the actual text that is being replaced, if the code does not match what is expected to be there, the change is not made. There is a very small chance that the wrong text (or perhaps a data section) could match the call to mcount and an inappropriate modification could be made. This patch series adds ftrace_release, to allow a module to remove the pointers to the mcount callers in the module from this table. Also, __init has "notrace" added to it so that text in the init section are not traced. The trace currently can not be enabled until after init anyway, so this should not be a problem. -- Steve