Re: Kernel marker has no performance impact on ia64.

[Mathieu Desnoyers]

* Peter Zijlstra (peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 18:12 -0400, Hideo AOKI wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I evaluated overhead of kernel marker using linux-2.6-sched-fixes
> > git tree, which includes several markers for LTTng, using an ia64
> > server.
> > 
> > While the immediate trace mark feature isn't implemented on ia64,
> > there is no major performance regression. So, I think that we 
> > don't have any issues to propose merging marker point patches 
> > into Linus's tree from the viewpoint of performance impact.
> 
> Performance is atm the least of the concerns regarding this work.
> 
> I'm still convinced markers are too ugly to live.
> 
> I also worry greatly about the fact that its too easy to expose too much
> to user-space. There are no clear rules and the free form marker format
> just begs for an inconsistent mess to arise.
> 
> IMHO the current free-form trace_mark() should be removed from the tree
> - its great for ad-hoc debugging but its a disaster waiting to happen
> for anything else. Anybody doing ad-hoc debugging can patch it in
> themselves if needed.
> 
> Regular trace points can be custom made; this has the advantages that it
> raises the implementation barrier and hopefully that encourages some
> thought in the process. It also avoid the code from growing into
> something that looks like someone had a long night of debugging.
> 

Maybe we could settle for an intermediate solution : I agree with you
that defining the trace points in headers, like you did for the
scheduler, makes the code much cleaner and makes things much easier to
maintain afterward. However, having the trace_mark mechanism underneath
helps a lot in plugging a generic tracer (actually, if we can settle the
marker issue, I've got a kernel tracer, LTTng, that I've been waiting
for quite a while to push to mainline that I would like to post someday).

So I would be in favor of requiring tracing statements to be described
in static inline functions, in header files, that could preferably call
trace_mark() and optionally also call other in-kernel tracers directly.

Ideally, we could re-use the immediate values infrastructure to control
activation of these trace points with minimal impact on the system.

One of my goal is to provide a mechanism that can feed both non-debug
and debug information to a generic tracing mechanism to allow
system-wide analysis of the kernel, both for production system and
kernel debugging.

Mathieu

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Mathieu Desnoyers
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