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Implement a basic state machine checker in the debugobjects.
This state machine checker detects races and inconsistencies within the "active"
life of a debugobject. The checker only keeps track of the current state; all
the state machine logic is kept at the object instance level.
The checker works by adding a supplementary "unsigned int astate" field to the
debug_obj structure. It keeps track of the current "active state" of the object.
The only constraints that are imposed on the states by the debugobjects system
is that:
- activation of an object sets the current active state to 0,
- deactivation of an object expects the current active state to be 0.
For the rest of the states, the state mapping is determined by the specific
object instance. Therefore, the logic keeping track of the state machine is
within the specialized instance, without any need to know about it at the
debugobject level.
The current object active state is changed by calling:
debug_object_active_state(addr, descr, expect, next)
where "expect" is the expected state and "next" is the next state to move to if
the expected state is found. A warning is generated if the expected is not
found.
Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
CC: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
CC: akpm@linux-foundation.org
CC: mingo@elte.hu
CC: laijs@cn.fujitsu.com
CC: dipankar@in.ibm.com
CC: josh@joshtriplett.org
CC: dvhltc@us.ibm.com
CC: niv@us.ibm.com
CC: peterz@infradead.org
CC: rostedt@goodmis.org
CC: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
CC: dhowells@redhat.com
CC: eric.dumazet@gmail.com
CC: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
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We can see an ever repeating problem pattern with objects of any kind in the
kernel:
1) freeing of active objects
2) reinitialization of active objects
Both problems can be hard to debug because the crash happens at a point where
we have no chance to decode the root cause anymore. One problem spot are
kernel timers, where the detection of the problem often happens in interrupt
context and usually causes the machine to panic.
While working on a timer related bug report I had to hack specialized code
into the timer subsystem to get a reasonable hint for the root cause. This
debug hack was fine for temporary use, but far from a mergeable solution due
to the intrusiveness into the timer code.
The code further lacked the ability to detect and report the root cause
instantly and keep the system operational.
Keeping the system operational is important to get hold of the debug
information without special debugging aids like serial consoles and special
knowledge of the bug reporter.
The problems described above are not restricted to timers, but timers tend to
expose it usually in a full system crash. Other objects are less explosive,
but the symptoms caused by such mistakes can be even harder to debug.
Instead of creating specialized debugging code for the timer subsystem a
generic infrastructure is created which allows developers to verify their code
and provides an easy to enable debug facility for users in case of trouble.
The debugobjects core code keeps track of operations on static and dynamic
objects by inserting them into a hashed list and sanity checking them on
object operations and provides additional checks whenever kernel memory is
freed.
The tracked object operations are:
- initializing an object
- adding an object to a subsystem list
- deleting an object from a subsystem list
Each operation is sanity checked before the operation is executed and the
subsystem specific code can provide a fixup function which allows to prevent
the damage of the operation. When the sanity check triggers a warning message
and a stack trace is printed.
The list of operations can be extended if the need arises. For now it's
limited to the requirements of the first user (timers).
The core code enqueues the objects into hash buckets. The hash index is
generated from the address of the object to simplify the lookup for the check
on kfree/vfree. Each bucket has it's own spinlock to avoid contention on a
global lock.
The debug code can be compiled in without being active. The runtime overhead
is minimal and could be optimized by asm alternatives. A kernel command line
option enables the debugging code.
Thanks to Ingo Molnar for review, suggestions and cleanup patches.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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