Tag: linux module

Lin­ux­u­la­tor progress

This week­end I made some progress in the linuxulator:

  • I MFCed the report­ing of some linux-syscalls to 9‑stable and 8‑stable.
  • I updat­ed my linuxulator-dtrace patch to a recent ‑cur­rent. I already com­piled it on i386 and arundel@ has it com­piled on amd64. I count­ed more than 500 new DTrace probes. Now that DTrace res­cans for SDT probes when a ker­nel mod­ule is loaded, there is no ker­nel pan­ic any­more when the lin­ux mod­ule is loaded after the DTrace mod­ules and you want to use DTrace. I try to com­mit this at a morn­ing of a day where I can fix things dur­ing the day in case some prob­lems show up which I did not notice dur­ing my testing.
  • I cre­at­ed a PR for portmgr@ to repocopy a new linux_base port.
  • I set the expi­ra­tion date of linux_base-fc4 (only used by 7.x and upstream way past its EoL) and all depen­dent ports. It is set to the EoL of the last 7.x release, which can not use a lat­er linux_base port. I also added a com­ment which explains that the date is the EoL of the last 7.x release.
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New DTrace probes for the linuxulator

I for­ward port­ed my DTrace probes for the FreeB­SD lin­ux­u­la­tor from a 2008-current to a recent ‑cur­rent. I have not the com­plete FreeB­SD lin­ux­u­la­tor cov­ered, but a big part is already done. I can check the major locks in the lin­ux­u­la­tor, trace futex­es, and I have a D‑script which yells at a lot of errors which could hap­pen but should not.

Some of my D‑scripts need some changes, as real-world test­ing showed that they are not real­ly work­ing as expect­ed. They can get over­whelmed by the amount of spec­u­la­tion and dynam­ic vari­ables (error mes­sage: dynam­ic vari­able drops with non-empty dirty list). For the dynam­ic vari­ables prob­lem I found a dis­cus­sion on the net with some sug­ges­tions. For the spec­u­la­tion part I expect sim­i­lar tuning-possibilities.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly the D‑script which checks the inter­nal locks fails to com­pile. Seems there is a lit­tle mis­un­der­stand­ing on my side how the D‑language is sup­posed to work.

I try to get some time lat­er to have a look at those problems.

Dur­ing my devel­op­ment I stum­bled over some gener­ic DTrace prob­lems with the SDT provider I use for my probes:

  • If you load the Lin­ux mod­ule after the SDT mod­ule, your sys­tem will pan­ic as soon as you want to access some probes, e.g. “dtrace ‑l” will pan­ic the sys­tem. Load­ing the Lin­ux mod­ule before the SDT mod­ule pre­vents the panic.
  • Unload­ing the SDT mod­ule while the Lin­ux mod­ule with the SDT probes is still loaded pan­ics the sys­tem too. Do not unload the Lin­ux mod­ule if you run with my patch.

Accord­ing to avg@ those are known prob­lems, but I think nobody is work­ing on this. This is bad, because this means I can not com­mit my cur­rent patchset.

If some­one wants to try the new DTrace probes for the lin­ux­u­la­tor, feel free to go to http://www.Leidinger.net/FreeBSD/current-patches/ and down­load linuxulator-dtrace.diff. I do not offer a work­ing hyper­link here on pur­pose, the SDT bugs can hurt if you are not care­ful, and I want to make the use of this patch a strong opt-in because of this. If the patch hurts you, it is your fault, you have been warned.

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Lin­ux mod­ules now usable on amd64

Today I removed the LINUX stuff from GENERIC on amd64 (this syncs with i386). Now that kib@ com­mit­ted the ker­nel link­er stuff the lin­ux mod­ule is usable on amd64 too. This allows for more easy testing/patching on amd64 and also allows on-demand-loading like on i386.

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