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Commit bdf88217 authored by Roland McGrath's avatar Roland McGrath Committed by Ingo Molnar
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x86: user_regset header



The new header <linux/regset.h> defines the types struct user_regset and
struct user_regset_view, with some associated declarations.  This new set
of interfaces will become the standard way for arch code to expose
user-mode machine-specific state.  A single set of entry points into arch
code can do all the low-level work in one place to fill the needs of core
dumps, ptrace, and any other user-mode debugging facilities that might come
along in the future.

For existing arch code to adapt to the user_regset interfaces, each arch
can work from the code it already has to support core files and ptrace.
The formats you want for user_regset are the core file formats.  The only
wrinkle in adapting old ptrace implementation code as user_regset get and
set functions is that these functions can be called on current as well as
on another task_struct that is stopped and switched out as for ptrace.
For some kinds of machine state, you may have to load it directly from CPU
registers or otherwise differently for current than for another thread.
(Your core dump support already handles this in elf_core_copy_regs for
current and elf_core_copy_task_regs for other tasks, so just check there.)
The set function should also be made to work on current in case that
entails some special cases, though this was never required before for
ptrace.  Adding this flexibility covers the arch needs to open the door to
more sophisticated new debugging facilities that don't always need to
context-switch to do every little thing.

The copyin/copyout helper functions (in a later patch) relieve the arch
code of most of the cumbersome details of the flexible get/set interfaces.

Signed-off-by: default avatarRoland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: default avatarThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
parent 0ddc9cc8
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