The perf subsystem today unifies various tracing and monitoring features, from both software and hardware. One benefit of the perf subsystem is automatically inheriting events to child tasks, which enables process-wide events monitoring with low overheads. By default perf events are non-intrusive, not affecting behaviour of the tasks being monitored.
For certain use-cases, however, it makes sense to leverage the generality of the perf events subsystem and optionally allow the tasks being monitored to receive signals on events they are interested in. This patch series adds the option to synchronously signal user space on events.
To better support process-wide synchronous self-monitoring, without events propagating to children that do not share the current process's shared environment, two pre-requisite patches are added to optionally restrict inheritance to CLONE_THREAD, and remove events on exec (without affecting the parent).
Examples how to use these features can be found in the tests added at the end of the series. In addition to the tests added, the series has also been subjected to syzkaller fuzzing (focus on 'kernel/events/' coverage).
Motivation and Example Uses ---------------------------
1. Our immediate motivation is low-overhead sampling-based race detection for user space [1]. By using perf_event_open() at process initialization, we can create hardware breakpoint/watchpoint events that are propagated automatically to all threads in a process. As far as we are aware, today no existing kernel facility (such as ptrace) allows us to set up process-wide watchpoints with minimal overheads (that are comparable to mprotect() of whole pages).
2. Other low-overhead error detectors that rely on detecting accesses to certain memory locations or code, process-wide and also only in a specific set of subtasks or threads.
[1] https://llvm.org/devmtg/2020-09/slides/Morehouse-GWP-Tsan.pdf
Other ideas for use-cases we found interesting, but should only illustrate the range of potential to further motivate the utility (we're sure there are more):
3. Code hot patching without full stop-the-world. Specifically, by setting a code breakpoint to entry to the patched routine, then send signals to threads and check that they are not in the routine, but without stopping them further. If any of the threads will enter the routine, it will receive SIGTRAP and pause.
4. Safepoints without mprotect(). Some Java implementations use "load from a known memory location" as a safepoint. When threads need to be stopped, the page containing the location is mprotect()ed and threads get a signal. This could be replaced with a watchpoint, which does not require a whole page nor DTLB shootdowns.
5. Threads receiving signals on performance events to throttle/unthrottle themselves.
6. Tracking data flow globally.
Changelog ---------
v3: * Add patch "perf: Rework perf_event_exit_event()" to beginning of series, courtesy of Peter Zijlstra. * Rework "perf: Add support for event removal on exec" based on the added "perf: Rework perf_event_exit_event()". * Fix kselftests to work with more recent libc, due to the way it forces using the kernel's own siginfo_t. * Add basic perf-tool built-in test.
v2/RFC: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210310104139.679618-1-elver@google.com * Patch "Support only inheriting events if cloned with CLONE_THREAD" added to series. * Patch "Add support for event removal on exec" added to series. * Patch "Add kselftest for process-wide sigtrap handling" added to series. * Patch "Add kselftest for remove_on_exec" added to series. * Implicitly restrict inheriting events if sigtrap, but the child was cloned with CLONE_CLEAR_SIGHAND, because it is not generally safe if the child cleared all signal handlers to continue sending SIGTRAP. * Various minor fixes (see details in patches).
v1/RFC: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210223143426.2412737-1-elver@google.com
Pre-series: The discussion at [2] led to the changes in this series. The approach taken in "Add support for SIGTRAP on perf events" to trigger the signal was suggested by Peter Zijlstra in [3].
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CACT4Y+YPrXGw+AtESxAgPyZ84TYkNZdP0xpocX2jwVAbZD...
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YBv3rAT566k+6zjg@hirez.programming.kicks-ass.ne...
Marco Elver (10): perf: Apply PERF_EVENT_IOC_MODIFY_ATTRIBUTES to children perf: Support only inheriting events if cloned with CLONE_THREAD perf: Add support for event removal on exec signal: Introduce TRAP_PERF si_code and si_perf to siginfo perf: Add support for SIGTRAP on perf events perf: Add breakpoint information to siginfo on SIGTRAP selftests/perf_events: Add kselftest for process-wide sigtrap handling selftests/perf_events: Add kselftest for remove_on_exec tools headers uapi: Sync tools/include/uapi/linux/perf_event.h perf test: Add basic stress test for sigtrap handling
Peter Zijlstra (1): perf: Rework perf_event_exit_event()
arch/m68k/kernel/signal.c | 3 + arch/x86/kernel/signal_compat.c | 5 +- fs/signalfd.c | 4 + include/linux/compat.h | 2 + include/linux/perf_event.h | 6 +- include/linux/signal.h | 1 + include/uapi/asm-generic/siginfo.h | 6 +- include/uapi/linux/perf_event.h | 5 +- include/uapi/linux/signalfd.h | 4 +- kernel/events/core.c | 297 +++++++++++++----- kernel/fork.c | 2 +- kernel/signal.c | 11 + tools/include/uapi/linux/perf_event.h | 5 +- tools/perf/tests/Build | 1 + tools/perf/tests/builtin-test.c | 5 + tools/perf/tests/sigtrap.c | 148 +++++++++ tools/perf/tests/tests.h | 1 + .../testing/selftests/perf_events/.gitignore | 3 + tools/testing/selftests/perf_events/Makefile | 6 + tools/testing/selftests/perf_events/config | 1 + .../selftests/perf_events/remove_on_exec.c | 260 +++++++++++++++ tools/testing/selftests/perf_events/settings | 1 + .../selftests/perf_events/sigtrap_threads.c | 206 ++++++++++++ 23 files changed, 896 insertions(+), 87 deletions(-) create mode 100644 tools/perf/tests/sigtrap.c create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/perf_events/.gitignore create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/perf_events/Makefile create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/perf_events/config create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/perf_events/remove_on_exec.c create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/perf_events/settings create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/perf_events/sigtrap_threads.c