Re: [RFC,PATCH 14/14] utrace core

From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
To: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>,
	Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>,
	Ananth Mavinakayanahalli <ananth@in.ibm.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
	"Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche@redhat.com>,
	Ingo@firstfloor.org, "Molnar <mingo"@firstfloor.org,
	utrace-devel@redhat.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC,PATCH 14/14] utrace core
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:50:18 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20091125215018.GB4916@infradead.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87my2bwtno.fsf@basil.nowhere.org>

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 09:32:27PM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
> Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > From: Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>
> >
> > This adds the utrace facility, a new modular interface in the kernel
> > for implementing user thread tracing and debugging.  This fits on top
> > of the tracehook_* layer, so the new code is well-isolated.
> 
> Could we just drop the tracehook layer if this finally merged
> and call the low level functions directly?
> 
> It might have been reasonably early on when it was still out of tree,
> but longer term when it's integrated having strange opaque hooks
> like that just makes the coder harder to read and maintain.

I agree that linux/tracehook.h as a separate layer is pretty annoying,
but a lot of the helper actually are quite useful.  I'd suggest to throw
a patch ontop of the series to rename all the useful macros to utrace_
and move them into utrace.h and just remove those that are really
trivial wrappers.