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breakpoint assistance (uprobes)


I'm sorry for my long absence from the uprobes discussion.  Rather
than trying to respond to all the individual questions and proposals,
I'll just start in on the design topics that I think are most useful
to pursue first.

The central component of the currently going uprobes ideas that needs
to be worked out is what I'll call breakpoint assistance.  This is
broadly useful for many utrace-based facilities to integrate, and any
worthwhile implementation will become a modular component used by
other things unrelated to systemtap.  Today I'll discuss the major
design choices in this component.

On the status of utrace: it's now included in Andrew Morton's -mm tree;
he tracks my current patchset from http://redhat.com/~roland/utrace/
regularly.  The best way anyone can accelerate the process towards
full upstream acceptance is to participate in the public review and
discussion.  The correct forum for that is lkml (and CC: roland@redhat.com),
not this mailing list.

Standard breakpoint insertion is straightforward and that is adequate.
The complexity is in stepping over a breakpointed instruction to
resume.  There are three essential implementation strategies available
(leaving aside pure emulation, and I don't know of a fifth).

Stop all threads, remove breakpoint, single-step, re-insert, resume all.
This is the traditional method used by debuggers.  It is reliable and
machine-independent, but has always been slow.  Doing this via utrace in
the kernel directly will be quite a bit faster than a user-level
debugger can do.  This is the natural fallback position if other methods
don't pan out.  The implementation of this is fairly straightfoward, but
most of it will fall out of any new higher-level general facilities on
top of utrace.  It's not especially interesting to do it independently
in support of systemtap/uprobes.

Single-step out of line, in the style of kprobes.  I had been skeptical
about doing this for user mode, but lately I'm feeling more optimistic.
This appears to be the most promising direction in the short term.  
Its implementation issues are complex.  I'll get into those in a
separate thread momentarily.

Fancy VM tricks.  This is the shangri-la path and the general subject
has long been on my mind as future work for the utrace world.  The
general capability required to do this is useful for a variety of other
things, including thread-specific breakpoint insertion and a better way
to do breakpoint insertion generally, and VM watchpoints.  I am full of
ideas about this, but figuring it out requires some hard brainstorming
with someone who knows the Linux VM code in much more detail than I do.
I haven't had the chance to do that yet.  (What I have in mind also
needs to wait for a little bit of fancier utrace infrastructure
development, too.)  I don't know enough yet to be confident on the details
of a design, but I know enough to be pretty sure that there is no simple
"surgical strike" implementation plan that will work with acceptable
properties for a production system.  I certainly think we'll pursue this
in the long term regardless, but I think it's too big a nut to crack soon.


Thanks,
Roland


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