Re: [PATCH v5 24/25] ptrace: add PTRACE_GET_SYSCALL_INFO request

On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 10:04:22 PST (-0800), paul.burton@mips.com wrote:

Hi Dmitry,

On Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 07:09:40PM +0300, Dmitry V. Levin wrote:

quoted

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:

quoted

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.

quoted

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