Re: [PATCH v3 1/2] kretprobe: produce sane stack traces

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Fri, 2 Nov 2018 17:59:32 +1100
Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com> wrote:

> As an aside, I just tested with the frame unwinder and it isn't thrown
> off-course by kretprobe_trampoline (though obviously the stack is still
> wrong). So I think we just need to hook into the ORC unwinder to get it
> to continue skipping up the stack, as well as add the rewriting code for
> the stack traces (for all unwinders I guess -- though ideally we should

I agree that this is the right solution.

> do this without having to add the same code to every architecture).

True, and there's an art to consolidating the code between
architectures.

I'm currently looking at function graph and seeing if I can consolidate
it too. And I'm also trying to get multiple uses to hook into its
infrastructure. I think I finally figured out a way to do so.

The reason it is difficult, is that you need to maintain state between
the entry of a function and the exit for each task and callback that is
registered. Hence, it's a 3x tuple (function stack, task, callbacks).
And this must be maintained with preemption. A task may sleep for
minutes, and the state needs to be retained.

The only state that must be retained is the function stack with the
task, because if that gets out of sync, the system crashes. But the
callback state can be removed.

Here's what is there now:

 When something is registered with the function graph tracer, every
 task gets a shadowed stack. A hook is added to fork to add shadow
 stacks to new tasks. Once a shadow stack is added to a task, that
 shadow stack is never removed until the task exits.

 When the function is entered, the real return code is stored in the
 shadow stack and the trampoline address is put in its place.

 On return, the trampoline is called, and it will pop off the return
 code from the shadow stack and return to that.

The issue with multiple users, is that different users may want to
trace different functions. On entry, the user could say it doesn't want
to trace the current function, and the return part must not be called
on exit. Keeping track of which user needs the return called is the
tricky part.

Here's what I plan on implementing:

 Along with a shadow stack, I was going to add a 4096 byte (one page)
 array that holds 64 8 byte masks to every task as well. This will allow
 64 simultaneous users (which is rather extreme). If we need to support
 more, we could allocate another page for all tasks. The 8 byte mask
 will represent each depth (allowing to do this for 64 function call
 stack depth, which should also be enough).

 Each user will be assigned one of the masks. Each bit in the mask
 represents the depth of the shadow stack. When a function is called,
 each user registered with the function graph tracer will get called
 (if they asked to be called for this function, via the ftrace_ops
 hashes) and if they want to trace the function, then the bit is set in
 the mask for that stack depth.

 When the function exits the function and we pop off the return code
 from the shadow stack, we then look at all the bits set for the
 corresponding users, and call their return callbacks, and ignore
 anything that is not set.


When a user is unregistered, it the corresponding bits that represent
it are cleared, and it the return callback will not be called. But the
tasks being traced will still have their shadow stack to allow it to
get back to normal.

I'll hopefully have a prototype ready by plumbers.

And this too will require each architecture to probably change. As a
side project to this, I'm going to try to consolidate the function
graph code among all the architectures as well. Not an easy task.

-- Steve