ARM: 6668/1: ptrace: remove single-step emulation code
PTRACE_SINGLESTEP is a ptrace request designed to offer single-stepping support to userspace when the underlying architecture has hardware support for this operation. On ARM, we set arch_has_single_step() to 1 and attempt to emulate hardware single-stepping by disassembling the current instruction to determine the next pc and placing a software breakpoint on that location. Unfortunately this has the following problems: 1.) Only a subset of ARMv7 instructions are supported 2.) Thumb-2 is unsupported 3.) The code is not SMP safe We could try to fix this code, but it turns out that because of the above issues it is rarely used in practice. GDB, for example, uses PTRACE_POKETEXT and PTRACE_PEEKTEXT to manage breakpoints itself and does not require any kernel assistance. This patch removes the single-step emulation code from ptrace meaning that the PTRACE_SINGLESTEP request will return -EIO on ARM. Portable code must check the return value from a ptrace call and handle the failure gracefully. Acked-by: Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com> Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk>
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