1. 08 Feb, 2009 2 commits
    • Steven Rostedt's avatar
      ring-buffer: add NMI protection for spinlocks · 78d904b4
      Steven Rostedt authored
      Impact: prevent deadlock in NMI
      
      The ring buffers are not yet totally lockless with writing to
      the buffer. When a writer crosses a page, it grabs a per cpu spinlock
      to protect against a reader. The spinlocks taken by a writer are not
      to protect against other writers, since a writer can only write to
      its own per cpu buffer. The spinlocks protect against readers that
      can touch any cpu buffer. The writers are made to be reentrant
      with the spinlocks disabling interrupts.
      
      The problem arises when an NMI writes to the buffer, and that write
      crosses a page boundary. If it grabs a spinlock, it can be racing
      with another writer (since disabling interrupts does not protect
      against NMIs) or with a reader on the same CPU. Luckily, most of the
      users are not reentrant and protects against this issue. But if a
      user of the ring buffer becomes reentrant (which is what the ring
      buffers do allow), if the NMI also writes to the ring buffer then
      we risk the chance of a deadlock.
      
      This patch moves the ftrace_nmi_enter called by nmi_enter() to the
      ring buffer code. It replaces the current ftrace_nmi_enter that is
      used by arch specific code to arch_ftrace_nmi_enter and updates
      the Kconfig to handle it.
      
      When an NMI is called, it will set a per cpu variable in the ring buffer
      code and will clear it when the NMI exits. If a write to the ring buffer
      crosses page boundaries inside an NMI, a trylock is used on the spin
      lock instead. If the spinlock fails to be acquired, then the entry
      is discarded.
      
      This bug appeared in the ftrace work in the RT tree, where event tracing
      is reentrant. This workaround solved the deadlocks that appeared there.
      Signed-off-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
      78d904b4
    • Steven Rostedt's avatar
      trace: remove deprecated entry->cpu · 1830b52d
      Steven Rostedt authored
      Impact: fix to prevent developers from using entry->cpu
      
      With the new ring buffer infrastructure, the cpu for the entry is
      implicit with which CPU buffer it is on.
      
      The original code use to record the current cpu into the generic
      entry header, which can be retrieved by entry->cpu. When the
      ring buffer was introduced, the users were convert to use the
      the cpu number of which cpu ring buffer was in use (this was passed
      to the tracers by the iterator: iter->cpu).
      
      Unfortunately, the cpu item in the entry structure was never removed.
      This allowed for developers to use it instead of the proper iter->cpu,
      unknowingly, using an uninitialized variable. This was not the fault
      of the developers, since it would seem like the logical place to
      retrieve the cpu identifier.
      
      This patch removes the cpu item from the entry structure and fixes
      all the users that should have been using iter->cpu.
      Signed-off-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
      1830b52d
  2. 05 Feb, 2009 1 commit
  3. 04 Feb, 2009 37 commits