On Mon, 2016-01-25 at 16:31 +0100, Torsten Duwe wrote:

At least POWER7/8 have MMUs that don't completely autoload;
a normal, recoverable memory fault might pass through these functions.
If a dynamic tracer function causes such a fault, any of these functions
being traced with -mprofile-kernel may cause an endless recursion.

I'm not really happy with this one, still :)

At the moment I can trace these without any problems, with either ftrace or
kprobes, but obviously it was causing you some trouble. So I'd like to
understand why you were having issues when regular tracing doesn't.

If it's the case that tracing can work for these functions, but live patching
doesn't (for some reason), then maybe these should be blocked by the live
patching infrastructure rather than at the ftrace/kprobes level.

cheers