(From the original mail)

Steven Rostedt wrote:
>
> Along came Gregory Haskins, who was bickering about having ftrace enabled
> on a production -rt kernel. I told him the reasons that this would be bad
> and then he started thinking out loud, and suggesting wild ideas, like
> patching gcc!
>   
^^^^^^^^^^

Ingo Molnar wrote:
> Eventually gcc should be extended to provide a separate section for 
> instrumentation patch sites, instead of us having to disassemble the 
> object code. 

:)

I obviously agree with this, so +1

Though, tbh, at the time I suggested it I didn't think of Steve's idea 
to post-process which was quite clever. But I do agree that having gcc 
do it will probably save some build time since it will probably be 
trivial for it to do this when already processing -pg. It would have the 
added benefit of letting the arch specific toolchain do the arch 
specific work (though I think Steve's solution capitalizes on the 
toolchain extensively as it is).

The biggest downside is that we would have an external dependency on gcc 
for the feature, but I guess the kernel already has some of those anyway 
(e.g. the stack overflow guard feature, etc). We could always fall back 
on Steve's post-processing if the toolchain lacks the feature.

-Greg