Skip to content
Commit 1cc33161 authored by Ravi Bangoria's avatar Ravi Bangoria Committed by Steven Rostedt (VMware)
Browse files

uprobes: Support SDT markers having reference count (semaphore)



Userspace Statically Defined Tracepoints[1] are dtrace style markers
inside userspace applications. Applications like PostgreSQL, MySQL,
Pthread, Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, Node.js, libvirt, QEMU, glib etc
have these markers embedded in them. These markers are added by developer
at important places in the code. Each marker source expands to a single
nop instruction in the compiled code but there may be additional
overhead for computing the marker arguments which expands to couple of
instructions. In case the overhead is more, execution of it can be
omitted by runtime if() condition when no one is tracing on the marker:

    if (reference_counter > 0) {
        Execute marker instructions;
    }

Default value of reference counter is 0. Tracer has to increment the
reference counter before tracing on a marker and decrement it when
done with the tracing.

Implement the reference counter logic in core uprobe. User will be
able to use it from trace_uprobe as well as from kernel module. New
trace_uprobe definition with reference counter will now be:

    <path>:<offset>[(ref_ctr_offset)]

where ref_ctr_offset is an optional field. For kernel module, new
variant of uprobe_register() has been introduced:

    uprobe_register_refctr(inode, offset, ref_ctr_offset, consumer)

No new variant for uprobe_unregister() because it's assumed to have
only one reference counter for one uprobe.

[1] https://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/UserSpaceProbeImplementation

Note: 'reference counter' is called as 'semaphore' in original Dtrace
(or Systemtap, bcc and even in ELF) documentation and code. But the
term 'semaphore' is misleading in this context. This is just a counter
used to hold number of tracers tracing on a marker. This is not really
used for any synchronization. So we are calling it a 'reference counter'
in kernel / perf code.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180820044250.11659-2-ravi.bangoria@linux.ibm.com

Reviewed-by: default avatarMasami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>
[Only trace_uprobe.c]
Reviewed-by: default avatarOleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarSong Liu <songliubraving@fb.com>
Tested-by: default avatarSong Liu <songliubraving@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarRavi Bangoria <ravi.bangoria@linux.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt (VMware) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
parent d6b183ed
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment