perf_counter: x86: Fix call-chain support to use NMI-safe methods
authorPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:07:24 +0000 (13:07 +0200)
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:57:53 +0000 (15:57 +0200)
commit74193ef0ecab92535c8517f082f1f50504526c9b
tree532a763dabbd198c514707077aae4df4bb7de15e
parent3ff0141aa3a03ca3388b40b36167d0a37919f3fd
perf_counter: x86: Fix call-chain support to use NMI-safe methods

__copy_from_user_inatomic() isn't NMI safe in that it can trigger
the page fault handler which is another trap and its return path
invokes IRET which will also close the NMI context.

Therefore use a GUP based approach to copy the stack frames over.

We tried an alternative solution as well: we used a forward ported
version of Mathieu Desnoyers's "NMI safe INT3 and Page Fault" patch
that modifies the exception return path to use an open-coded IRET with
explicit stack unrolling and TF checking.

This didnt work as it interacted with faulting user-space instructions,
causing them not to restart properly, which corrupts user-space
registers.

Solving that would probably involve disassembling those instructions
and backtracing the RIP. But even without that, the code was deemed
rather complex to the already non-trivial x86 entry assembly code,
so instead we went for this GUP based method that does a
software-walk of the pagetables.

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com>
Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_counter.c