Re: [PATCH 3/3] ftrace: function tracer with irqs disabled

From: Zhang, Yanmin
Date: Tue Nov 04 2008 - 03:18:54 EST



On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 09:07 +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Running hackbench 3 times with the irqs disabled and 3 times with
> > the preempt disabled function tracer yielded:
> >
> > tracing type times entries recorded
> > ------------ -------- ----------------
> > irq disabled 43.393 166433066
> > 43.282 166172618
> > 43.298 166256704
> >
> > preempt disabled 38.969 159871710
> > 38.943 159972935
> > 39.325 161056510
>
> your numbers might be correct, but i found that hackbench is not
> reliable boot-to-boot
I found that, too. But if I kill most background processes before testing,
hackbench result looks quite stable.

> - it can easily produce 10% systematic noise or
> more. (perhaps depending on how the various socket data structures
> happen to be allocated)
>
> the really conclusive way to test this would be to add a hack that
> either does preempt disable or irqs disable, depending on a runtime
> flag - and then observe how hackbench performance reacts to the value
> of that flag.
>
> note that preempt-disable will also produce less trace entries,
> especially in very irq-rich workloads. Hence it will be "faster".
>
> Ingo
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