On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 11:12:01AM +0100, Dave Martin wrote:

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 07:15:31PM -0700, Colin Cross wrote:

quoted

About half the callers to unwind_frame end up limiting the number of
frames they will follow before giving up, so I wasn't sure if I should
put an arbitrary limit in unwind_frame or just make sure all callers
are bounded.  Your idea of limiting same sp frames instead of total
frames sounds better.  I can send a new patch that adds a new field to
struct stackframe (which will need to be initialized everywhere, the
struct is usually on the stack) and limits the recursion.  Any
suggestion on the recursion limit?  I would never expect to see a real
situation with more than a few, but on the other hand parsing the
frames should be pretty fast so a high number (100?) shouldn't cause
any user visible effect.

Talking to some tools guys about this, it sounds like there really
shouldn't be any stackless frame except for the leaf frame.  If there are
stackless functions they will probably not be visible in the frame chain
at all.  So it might make sense to have a pretty small limit.  Maybe it
could even be 1.  Cartainly a small number.

We should also add a check for whether the current and frame and previous
frame appear identical and abort if that's the case, if we don't do that
already.

The case that actually worries me is not the "end up looping for ever"
case, but the effects of having the stack change while the unwinder is
reading from it - for example:

                /* pop R4-R15 according to mask */
                load_sp = mask & (1 << (13 - 4));
                while (mask) {
                        if (mask & 1)
                                ctrl->vrs[reg] = *vsp++;
                        mask >>= 1;
                        reg++;
                }

Remember that for a running thread, the stack will be changing all the
time while another CPU tries to read it to do the unwind, and also
remember that the bottom of stack isn't really known.  All you have is
the snapshot of the registers when the thread was last stopped by the
scheduler, and that state probably isn't valid.

So what you're asking is for the unwinder to produce a backtrace from
a kernel stack which is possibly changing beneath it from an unknown
current state.

This doesn't sound like a particularly bright thing to be doing...