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Add support for a stream API to the kernel and expose related kfuncs to
BPF programs. Two streams are exposed, BPF_STDOUT and BPF_STDERR. These
can be used for printing messages that can be consumed from user space,
thus it's similar in spirit to existing trace_pipe interface.
The kernel will use the BPF_STDERR stream to notify the program of any
errors encountered at runtime. BPF programs themselves may use both
streams for writing debug messages. BPF library-like code may use
BPF_STDERR to print warnings or errors on misuse at runtime.
The implementation of a stream is as follows. Everytime a message is
emitted from the kernel (directly, or through a BPF program), a record
is allocated by bump allocating from per-cpu region backed by a page
obtained using alloc_pages_nolock(). This ensures that we can allocate
memory from any context. The eventual plan is to discard this scheme in
favor of Alexei's kmalloc_nolock() [0].
This record is then locklessly inserted into a list (llist_add()) so
that the printing side doesn't require holding any locks, and works in
any context. Each stream has a maximum capacity of 4MB of text, and each
printed message is accounted against this limit.
Messages from a program are emitted using the bpf_stream_vprintk kfunc,
which takes a stream_id argument in addition to working otherwise
similar to bpf_trace_vprintk.
The bprintf buffer helpers are extracted out to be reused for printing
the string into them before copying it into the stream, so that we can
(with the defined max limit) format a string and know its true length
before performing allocations of the stream element.
For consuming elements from a stream, we expose a bpf(2) syscall command
named BPF_PROG_STREAM_READ_BY_FD, which allows reading data from the
stream of a given prog_fd into a user space buffer. The main logic is
implemented in bpf_stream_read(). The log messages are queued in
bpf_stream::log by the bpf_stream_vprintk kfunc, and then pulled and
ordered correctly in the stream backlog.
For this purpose, we hold a lock around bpf_stream_backlog_peek(), as
llist_del_first() (if we maintained a second lockless list for the
backlog) wouldn't be safe from multiple threads anyway. Then, if we
fail to find something in the backlog log, we splice out everything from
the lockless log, and place it in the backlog log, and then return the
head of the backlog. Once the full length of the element is consumed, we
will pop it and free it.
The lockless list bpf_stream::log is a LIFO stack. Elements obtained
using a llist_del_all() operation are in LIFO order, thus would break
the chronological ordering if printed directly. Hence, this batch of
messages is first reversed. Then, it is stashed into a separate list in
the stream, i.e. the backlog_log. The head of this list is the actual
message that should always be returned to the caller. All of this is
done in bpf_stream_backlog_fill().
From the kernel side, the writing into the stream will be a bit more
involved than the typical printk. First, the kernel typically may print
a collection of messages into the stream, and parallel writers into the
stream may suffer from interleaving of messages. To ensure each group of
messages is visible atomically, we can lift the advantage of using a
lockless list for pushing in messages.
To enable this, we add a bpf_stream_stage() macro, and require kernel
users to use bpf_stream_printk statements for the passed expression to
write into the stream. Underneath the macro, we have a message staging
API, where a bpf_stream_stage object on the stack accumulates the
messages being printed into a local llist_head, and then a commit
operation splices the whole batch into the stream's lockless log list.
This is especially pertinent for rqspinlock deadlock messages printed to
program streams. After this change, we see each deadlock invocation as a
non-interleaving contiguous message without any confusion on the
reader's part, improving their user experience in debugging the fault.
While programs cannot benefit from this staged stream writing API, they
could just as well hold an rqspinlock around their print statements to
serialize messages, hence this is kept kernel-internal for now.
Overall, this infrastructure provides NMI-safe any context printing of
messages to two dedicated streams.
Later patches will add support for printing splats in case of BPF arena
page faults, rqspinlock deadlocks, and cond_break timeouts, and
integration of this facility into bpftool for dumping messages to user
space.
[0]: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20250501032718.65476-1-alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com
Reviewed-by: Eduard Zingerman <eddyz87@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Emil Tsalapatis <emil@etsalapatis.com>
Signed-off-by: Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi <memxor@gmail.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250703204818.925464-3-memxor@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
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