Messages in this thread | | | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Date | Thu, 13 Dec 2012 08:33:54 -0800 | Subject | Re: [GIT PULL] perf changes for v3.8 |
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On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 8:24 AM, David Ahern <dsahern@gmail.com> wrote: > > Without the kernel side restriction existing perf binaries will crash all > running VMs.
..and they apparently always did, and we had that situation for years without anybody ever even noticing.
And no, it's not a security fix, since you can just add the 'H' flag and it will *still* crash according to the thread I saw (ie there is some race condition in PEBS handling at VM entry, possibly at a hardware level).
So the real security fix has to either fix the root cause or the actual crash (which apparently is unknown), or to make perf be root-only at least in the presense of virtualization.
The "return EOPNOTSUPP" thing does nothing but annoy people.
> I could write the patch to completely invert the exclude_guest > logic -- make it include_guest. That breaks all existing perf binaries as > well - just a different syntax that gets broken. That regression is > acceptable?
It's not a regression since THAT CODE NEVER WORKED, for chissake! The case of people actually profiling into virtual machines crashes the running VMs, as you say. There's no way in hell we can call it a regression to say "you now have to use a flag if you profile a load with virtualization", since there wasn't any working case to begin with.
Linus
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