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Commit af085d90 authored by Josh Poimboeuf's avatar Josh Poimboeuf Committed by Jiri Kosina
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stacktrace/x86: add function for detecting reliable stack traces

For live patching and possibly other use cases, a stack trace is only
useful if it can be assured that it's completely reliable.  Add a new
save_stack_trace_tsk_reliable() function to achieve that.

Note that if the target task isn't the current task, and the target task
is allowed to run, then it could be writing the stack while the unwinder
is reading it, resulting in possible corruption.  So the caller of
save_stack_trace_tsk_reliable() must ensure that the task is either
'current' or inactive.

save_stack_trace_tsk_reliable() relies on the x86 unwinder's detection
of pt_regs on the stack.  If the pt_regs are not user-mode registers
from a syscall, then they indicate an in-kernel interrupt or exception
(e.g. preemption or a page fault), in which case the stack is considered
unreliable due to the nature of frame pointers.

It also relies on the x86 unwinder's detection of other issues, such as:

- corrupted stack data
- stack grows the wro...
parent c1ae3cfa
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