lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2008]   [Jan]   [31]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
From
SubjectRe: managing kallsyms_addresses
Date
On Thu 31 Jan 2008 12:27, Paulo Marques pondered:
> Robin Getz wrote:
> > When the kernel needs to find out what symbol is at a specific address, it
> > uses kallsyms_lookup() This seems to work pretty well - almost.
> >
> > The problem is today, we don't to remove the symbols from the init section
> > when the init section is freed. There is invalid data in
> > kallsyms_addresses.
> > [...]
> > There would be two solutions:
> > - when freeing the init section, remove all the init labels from the
> > kallsyms_addresses, and resort/pack it.
>
> This should be doable, but to be worth it, we would need to use
> different structures for the init symbols, that would be stored in
> __initdata.
>
> Then, ideally we would have separate functions in the __init section to
> look up symbols in those structures that would only be called until we
> released the init sections.
>
> On the plus side, this would avoid the "repacking" the kallsyms
> structures to remove the init labels.

I think this would be a good long term thing, but would require restructuring
of all the kallsyms scripts, as well as everything in the kernel...

> > - if the init section is unloaded, have is_kernel_inittext always
> > return 0.
>
> This is by far the simplest solution. I even STR a patch floating around
> to do this, by I can't seem to locate it now... :(

I can put something together if Rusty agrees this is the way to go.

> > I assume that similar things need to be handled for module init too, but I
> > have not run into that yet.
>
> It seems that at least the last solution should be easy enough to
> implement there.
>
> > Thoughts?
>
> I think that the simplest solution (the second one) is probably the best
> for now.
>
> One thing that did cross my mind though, is stuff like lockdep.

Hmmm - I would need to defer to Ingo to understand the dependencies in lockdep
and init labels/addresses in kallsyms_addresses.

> If we run a locking sequence that is called from init code, and later a
> different locking sequence is used when we already freed init data, how
> can the debug information show the names of the functions that generated
> the previous locking sequence?

Maybe the lockdep needs to keep track of the label, not the address.

> It seems that the only "correct" approach would be to store a "before
> freeing init sections" flag together with the function pointer, and then
> have a kallsyms interface that could receive this flag to know where to
> look.
>
> In that case, the first solution can not be used at all (because we need
> to keep the init symbols anyway) and the second solution could be simply
> implemented by having a default value for the flag that is the "current
> state" for that flag...

That seems a little cumbersome to me...

-Robin


\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2008-01-31 23:45    [W:0.193 / U:0.032 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site