Re: [PATCH 00/19] x86/dumpstack: rewrite x86 stack dump code

[Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 05:31:47PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 5:22 PM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> >
> > So without having yet looked at the code, I want people to understand
> > that to a very real degree, the stack tracer that the *oopsing* code
> > (ie what all the usual kernel fault handlers use) is very very special
> > code and needs to be handled very carefully, and needs to be extra
> > robust, even in the presence of stack corruption, and even in the
> > presence of the dwarf info being totally corrupted. Because we've very
> > much had both things happen.
> >
> > It is very possible that we should have two different stack tracers -
> > the stupid "for oopses only" code that doesn't necessarily give the
> > perfect trace, but is very anal and happily gives old stale addresses
> > (which can be very useful for seeing what happened just before the
> > "real" stack trace), and then a separate stack trace engine that is
> > clever and gets things right, and if that one faults it can depend on
> > the normal kernel fault handling picking up the pieces.
> 
> I think that Josh's code has the potential to be extremely robust
> *and* give more correct results when possible.  One thing I intend to
> review when v2 shows up is that it's as conservative as it needs to be
> to avoid ever dereferencing an out-of-bounds pointer.  And Josh's oops
> printer carefully walks and prints out all addresses on the stack
> (complete with question marks) even if the unwinder doesn't find them.

I should add that while the show_trace_log_lvl() code (which is used for
oopses) looks different on the surface, the algorithm is fundamentally
the same as before: traverse the stacks, scanning and printing any
kernel text addresses.

While doing the scanning and printing, it does call the frame pointer
unwinder in parallel, but like before, that's *only* used to determine
whether a found address should be printed without a question mark.  If
the unwinder goes off the rails, the scanning and printing of text
addresses goes on, undisturbed.

The frame pointer unwinder code itself is quite careful not to
dereference anything it shouldn't (though of course I welcome any review
comments that find otherwise).

> > Yes, the current stack tracer is  crufty. No, it's not perfect. But it
> > is very well tested, and has held up. That should not be dismissed.
> >
> 
> I think you may be giving the current tracer slightly more credit than
> it's due.  In my stack guard page patchset, I fixed two separate
> issues, one of which caused recursive faults and one of which caused
> it to output nothing at all.  So maybe *now* it's very robust :)  But
> it's still an umaintainable mess IMO, and Josh's patchset helps a
> *lot*.

-- 
Josh