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    SubjectRe: [PATCH 0/4] RFC: jump label - (tracepoint optimizations)
    * Mathieu Desnoyers (mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca) wrote:
    > * Jason Baron (jbaron@redhat.com) wrote:
    [...]
    > > Solution:
    > >
    > > In discussing this problem with Roland McGrath and Richard Henderson, we came
    > > up with a new 'asm goto' statement that allows branching to a label. Thus, this
    > > patch set introdues a 'STATIC_JUMP_IF()' macro as follows:
    > >
    > > #ifdef HAVE_STATIC_JUMP
    > >
    > > #define STATIC_JUMP_IF(tag, label, cond) \
    > > asm goto ("1:" /* 5-byte insn */ \
    > > P6_NOP5 \
    >
    > Hrm, be careful there. P6_NOP5 is not always a single instruction. If
    > you are preempted in the middle of it, bad things could happen, even
    > with stop_machine, if you iret in the middle the of the new jump
    > instruction. It could cause an illegal instruction fault. You should use
    > an atomic nop5. I think the function tracer already does, since I
    > told Steven about this exact issue.
    >

    Just to clarify this statement:

    P6_NOP5 happens to be an atomic nop, but nothing states this requirement
    in arch/x86/include/asm/nops.h. Other 5-bytes nops are defined as
    multiple instructions (e.g. 2 bytes + 3 bytes nops). So I recommend to
    create a family of ATOMIC_P6_NOP5 (and other ATOMIC_*_NOP5 defines) to
    document this atomicity requirement.

    Ftrace could probably handle this more gracefully than it does at the
    moment. It basically assumes that P6_NOP5 is atomic, and falls back on a
    5-bytes jmp if it detects that P6_NOP5 faults.

    That's coherent with the
    "TODO: check the cpuid to determine the best nop."

    present in x86 ftrace.c.

    So, at the very least, if we rely on nops.h having a single-instruction
    P6_NOP5 5 bytes nop, a comment to that effect should be added to nops.h.

    Mathieu

    --
    Mathieu Desnoyers
    OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68


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