From 4143c5cb36331155a1823af8b3a8c761a59fed71 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Steven Rostedt Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:46:01 -0500 Subject: ring-buffer: prevent infinite looping on time stamping Impact: removal of unnecessary looping The lockless part of the ring buffer allows for reentry into the code from interrupts. A timestamp is taken, a test is preformed and if it detects that an interrupt occurred that did tracing, it tries again. The problem arises if the timestamp code itself causes a trace. The detection will detect this and loop again. The difference between this and an interrupt doing tracing, is that this will fail every time, and cause an infinite loop. Currently, we test if the loop happens 1000 times, and if so, it will produce a warning and disable the ring buffer. The problem with this approach is that it makes it difficult to perform some types of tracing (tracing the timestamp code itself). Each trace entry has a delta timestamp from the previous entry. If a trace entry is reserved but and interrupt occurs and traces before the previous entry is commited, the delta timestamp for that entry will be zero. This actually makes sense in terms of tracing, because the interrupt entry happened before the preempted entry was commited, so one may consider the two happening at the same time. The order is still preserved in the buffer. With this idea, instead of trying to get a new timestamp if an interrupt made it in between the timestamp and the test, the entry could simply make the delta zero and continue. This will prevent interrupts or tracers in the timer code from causing the above loop. Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt --- kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'kernel') diff --git a/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c b/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c index 3f3380638646..2f76193c3489 100644 --- a/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c +++ b/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c @@ -1060,7 +1060,7 @@ rb_reserve_next_event(struct ring_buffer_per_cpu *cpu_buffer, /* Did the write stamp get updated already? */ if (unlikely(ts < cpu_buffer->write_stamp)) - goto again; + delta = 0; if (test_time_stamp(delta)) { -- cgit v1.2.3-58-ga151