On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 10:04:22 PST (-0800), paul.burton@xxxxxxxx wrote:
Hi Dmitry,
On Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 07:09:40PM +0300, Dmitry V. Levin wrote:
We decided to add .frame_pointer to struct ptrace_syscall_info just for
consistency with .instruction_pointer and .stack_pointer; I must have been
misled by comments in asm-generic/ptrace.h into thinking that
frame_pointer() is universally available across architectures.
Is it correct to say that you're using frame_pointer() purely on user
register state, not kernel?
If so then one option would be to define it for MIPS as something like:
static inline unsigned long frame_pointer(struct pt_regs *regs)
{
return regs->regs[30];
}
My concern with that though would be that providing frame_pointer()
unconditionally might mislead people into thinking that the kernel
always has frame pointers, when in reality current MIPS kernels never
do. In fact a comment in MIPS' asm/ptrace.h seems to suggest the lack of
frame_pointer() is intentional for exactly that reason:
Don't use asm-generic/ptrace.h it defines FP accessors that don't make
sense on MIPS. We rather want an error if they get invoked.
Looking across architectures though MIPS isn't going to be the only one
missing frame_pointer(). With a little grepping it appears that these
architectures provide frame_pointer():
arm
arm64
hexagon
nds32
powerpc
riscv
sparc
um
x86
That leaves a whole bunch of other architectures (16) which don't have
frame_pointer(), or at least not in a way that I could see at a glance.
We (RISC-V) default to compiling without frame pointers. I'm not sure if it
even makes sense have frame_pointer() on RISC-V, as it'll usually return
garbage.
Unlike .instruction_pointer and .stack_pointer that are actually needed
in strace, .frame_pointer is not used, so from strace PoV we don't really
need it.
So the question is, does anybody need a
struct ptrace_syscall_info.frame_pointer?
If yes, how can frame_pointer() be defined on MIPS?
Or should we just forget about making sense of frame_pointer() and remove
struct ptrace_syscall_info.frame_pointer from the proposed API?
So, along these lines my suggestion would be to avoid it if you don't
really need it anyway.
Thanks,
Paul
