History log of /linux-master/kernel/kallsyms_internal.h
Revision Date Author Comments
# 19bd8981 02-Nov-2022 Zhen Lei <thunder.leizhen@huawei.com>

kallsyms: Reduce the memory occupied by kallsyms_seqs_of_names[]

kallsyms_seqs_of_names[] records the symbol index sorted by address, the
maximum value in kallsyms_seqs_of_names[] is the number of symbols. And
2^24 = 16777216, which means that three bytes are enough to store the
index. This can help us save (1 * kallsyms_num_syms) bytes of memory.

Signed-off-by: Zhen Lei <thunder.leizhen@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>


# 60443c88 02-Nov-2022 Zhen Lei <thunder.leizhen@huawei.com>

kallsyms: Improve the performance of kallsyms_lookup_name()

Currently, to search for a symbol, we need to expand the symbols in
'kallsyms_names' one by one, and then use the expanded string for
comparison. It's O(n).

If we sort names in ascending order like addresses, we can also use
binary search. It's O(log(n)).

In order not to change the implementation of "/proc/kallsyms", the table
kallsyms_names[] is still stored in a one-to-one correspondence with the
address in ascending order.

Add array kallsyms_seqs_of_names[], it's indexed by the sequence number
of the sorted names, and the corresponding content is the sequence number
of the sorted addresses. For example:
Assume that the index of NameX in array kallsyms_seqs_of_names[] is 'i',
the content of kallsyms_seqs_of_names[i] is 'k', then the corresponding
address of NameX is kallsyms_addresses[k]. The offset in kallsyms_names[]
is get_symbol_offset(k).

Note that the memory usage will increase by (4 * kallsyms_num_syms)
bytes, the next two patches will reduce (1 * kallsyms_num_syms) bytes
and properly handle the case CONFIG_LTO_CLANG=y.

Performance test results: (x86)
Before:
min=234, max=10364402, avg=5206926
min=267, max=11168517, avg=5207587
After:
min=1016, max=90894, avg=7272
min=1014, max=93470, avg=7293

The average lookup performance of kallsyms_lookup_name() improved 715x.

Signed-off-by: Zhen Lei <thunder.leizhen@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>


# 71f8c155 16-May-2022 Stephen Brennan <stephen.s.brennan@oracle.com>

kallsyms: move declarations to internal header

Patch series "Expose kallsyms data in vmcoreinfo note".

The kernel can be configured to contain a lot of introspection or
debugging information built-in, such as ORC for unwinding stack traces,
BTF for type information, and of course kallsyms. Debuggers could use
this information to navigate a core dump or live system, but they need to
be able to find it.

This patch series adds the necessary symbols into vmcoreinfo, which would
allow a debugger to find and interpret the kallsyms table. Using the
kallsyms data, the debugger can then lookup any symbol, allowing it to
find ORC, BTF, or any other useful data.

This would allow a live kernel, or core dump, to be debugged without any
DWARF debuginfo. This is useful for many cases: the debuginfo may not
have been generated, or you may not want to deploy the large files
everywhere you need them.

I've demonstrated a proof of concept for this at LSF/MM+BPF during a
lighting talk. Using a work-in-progress branch of the drgn debugger, and
an extended set of BTF generated by a patched version of dwarves, I've
been able to open a core dump without any DWARF info and do basic tasks
such as enumerating slab caches, block devices, tasks, and doing
backtraces. I hope this series can be a first step toward a new
possibility of "DWARFless debugging".

Related discussion around the BTF side of this:
https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/586a6288-704a-f7a7-b256-e18a675927df@oracle.com/T/#u

Some work-in-progress branches using this feature:
https://github.com/brenns10/dwarves/tree/remove_percpu_restriction_1
https://github.com/brenns10/drgn/tree/kallsyms_plus_btf


This patch (of 2):

To include kallsyms data in the vmcoreinfo note, we must make the symbol
declarations visible outside of kallsyms.c. Move these to a new internal
header file.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220517000508.777145-1-stephen.s.brennan@oracle.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220517000508.777145-2-stephen.s.brennan@oracle.com
Signed-off-by: Stephen Brennan <stephen.s.brennan@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>
Cc: Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>
Cc: Dave Young <dyoung@redhat.com>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>
Cc: Stephen Boyd <swboyd@chromium.org>
Cc: Bixuan Cui <cuibixuan@huawei.com>
Cc: David Vernet <void@manifault.com>
Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
Cc: Sami Tolvanen <samitolvanen@google.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>