x86/dumpstack: Explain the reasoning for the prologue and buffer size

The whole reasoning behind the amount of opcode bytes dumped and prologue
length isn't very clear so write down some of the reasons for why it is
done the way it is.

Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180417161124.5294-10-bp@alien8.de

diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/dumpstack.c b/arch/x86/kernel/dumpstack.c
index ee344030fd0ae11ce2a644c479f871d970b69c86..666a284116ac43e2633f69893db17c332e26d314 100644 (file)
--- a/arch/x86/kernel/dumpstack.c
+++ b/arch/x86/kernel/dumpstack.c
@@ -72,6 +72,25 @@ static void printk_stack_address(unsigned long address, int reliable,
        printk("%s %s%pB\n", log_lvl, reliable ? "" : "? ", (void *)address);
 }
 
+/*
+ * There are a couple of reasons for the 2/3rd prologue, courtesy of Linus:
+ *
+ * In case where we don't have the exact kernel image (which, if we did, we can
+ * simply disassemble and navigate to the RIP), the purpose of the bigger
+ * prologue is to have more context and to be able to correlate the code from
+ * the different toolchains better.
+ *
+ * In addition, it helps in recreating the register allocation of the failing
+ * kernel and thus make sense of the register dump.
+ *
+ * What is more, the additional complication of a variable length insn arch like
+ * x86 warrants having longer byte sequence before rIP so that the disassembler
+ * can "sync" up properly and find instruction boundaries when decoding the
+ * opcode bytes.
+ *
+ * Thus, the 2/3rds prologue and 64 byte OPCODE_BUFSIZE is just a random
+ * guesstimate in attempt to achieve all of the above.
+ */
 void show_opcodes(u8 *rip, const char *loglvl)
 {
        unsigned int code_prologue = OPCODE_BUFSIZE * 2 / 3;