[PATCH v3 1/5] arm64: Kprobes with single stepping support

[Sandeepa Prabhu]

On 18 November 2014 20:26, Will Deacon <will.deacon at arm.com> wrote:

> One thing I noticed looking through this patch is that we're effectively
> reinventing a bunch of the instruction decoding logic that we already have
> in the kernel (introduced since Sandeepa last sent his patch).
>
> Could you take a look at include/asm/insn.h and kernel/insn.c please, and
> see if you can at least consolidate some of this? Some of it should be easy
> (i.e. reusing masks, using existing #defines to construct BRK encodings),
> but I appreciate there may be places where kprobes needs to add extra bits,
> in which case I'd really like to keep this all together if at all possible.
>
> We're currently in a position where the module loader, BPF jit, ftrace and
> the proposed alternative patching scheme are all using the same instruction
> manipulation functions, so we should try to continue that trend if we can.
Will,

kernel/insn.c support generating instruction encodings(forming opcodes
with given specifications), so for kprobes, only BRK encoding can use
this mechanism.
For instruction simulation, the instruction behavior should be
simulated on saved pt_regs, which is not supported on insn.c routines,
so still need probes-simulate-insn.c. Please point me if I am missing
something here.

>
> Thanks,
>
> Will