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From: "K.Prasad" <prasad@linux•vnet.ibm.com>
To: shaggy@linux•vnet.ibm.com, linuxppc-dev@ozlabs•org
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail•com>,
	Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@au1•ibm.com>,
	David Gibson <dwg@au1•ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC:PATCH 00/03] powerpc: Expose BookE debug registers through extended ptrace interface
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:48:30 +0530	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20100124191830.GB14075@in.ibm.com> (raw)

>From shaggy at linux.vnet.ibm.com  Tue Jan 19 08:57:04 2010
From: shaggy at linux.vnet.ibm.com (Dave Kleikamp)
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:57:04 -0700
Subject: [RFC:PATCH 00/03] powerpc: Expose BookE debug registers through
	extended ptrace interface
Message-ID: <20100118215704.15684.60646.sendpatchset@norville•austin.ibm.com>

> These patches implement an extention to the ptrace interface proposed by
> Thiago Bauermann and the the PowerPC gdb team.

(Using the plain text from mail archive..mail may not be in the usual
mail-reply format...kindly bear).

Hi,
  First of all, thanks for bringing this patch that puts the debug
registers in BookE to good use! I learnt about this patch submission
only recently...please see some of my concerns as under.

Given that there now exists generic kernel interfaces to use
hw-breakpoints - register_user_hw_breakpoint() and
unregister_hw_breakpoint() (available in mainline since 2.6.33-rc1), it
would be prudent to use them for the ptrace requests (that are made in
arch_ptrace()).

This would mean that some of the arch-specific debug register code that
read/write from/to the debug registers of Book-E may have to be in a
form that closely resembles arch/<x86><power>/kernel/hw_breakpoint.c 

A patch that enables arch-specific code for PPC64 is already submitted
(linuxppc-dev ref: 20100121084640.GA3252@in•ibm.com). This converts
ptrace requests for PTRACE_<GET><SET>_DEBUGREG flags to use the
above-mentioned interfaces for PPC64.

If you intend to re-write this patch to use the generic hw-breakpoint
interfaces (which I strongly recommend you to do, for the reasons mentioned
below), I would be more than glad to help you port them.

Some of the benefits of using these generic interfaces include:
- Interoperability with other users of debug register (such as parallel
  kernel requests) i.e. non-exclusive use of debug registers.
- Enables debugging/tracing tools such as perf-events and ftrace to make
  use of debug registers.
- Re-use of common code available in kernel (kernel/hw_breakpoint.c).

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
K.Prasad

             reply	other threads:[~2010-01-24 19:18 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-01-24 19:18 K.Prasad [this message]
2010-01-24 20:32 ` [RFC:PATCH 00/03] powerpc: Expose BookE debug registers through extended ptrace interface Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2010-01-28  7:13   ` K.Prasad
2010-01-30 20:44   ` Frederic Weisbecker
2010-01-30 21:33     ` Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2010-01-31  1:00       ` Frederic Weisbecker
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2010-01-18 21:57 Dave Kleikamp
2009-12-10 15:57 Dave Kleikamp
2009-12-11  2:23 ` Kumar Gala
2009-12-11  2:27   ` Dave Kleikamp
2009-12-11 20:07     ` Thiago Jung Bauermann
2009-12-11 20:51       ` Kumar Gala
2010-01-18 22:34   ` Dave Kleikamp
2010-02-03  2:03     ` Dave Kleikamp
2009-12-11  2:24 ` Kumar Gala
2009-12-11  2:29   ` Dave Kleikamp
2009-12-11  2:32     ` Kumar Gala
2009-12-12  4:18   ` Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2009-12-11  2:45 ` Kumar Gala
2010-01-18 22:41   ` Dave Kleikamp

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