Re: [PATCH] ftrace: Provide trace clock monotonic raw

From: Mathieu Desnoyers
Date: Thu May 07 2015 - 21:28:00 EST


----- Original Message -----
> On Tue, 5 May 2015 07:54:46 -0700
> Drew Richardson <drew.richardson@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW will advance more constantly than CLOCK_MONOTONIC.
> >
> > Imagine someone is trying to optimize a particular program to reduce
> > instructions executed for a given workload while minimizing the effect
> > on runtime. Also suppose that ntp is running and potentially making
> > larger adjustments to CLOCK_MONOTONIC. If ntp is adjusting
> > CLOCK_MONOTONIC to advance more rapidly, the program will appear to
> > use fewer instructions per second but run longer than it would if
> > CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW had been used. The total number of instructions
> > observed would be the same regardless of the clock source used, but
> > how it's attributed to time would be affected.
> >
> > Conversely if ntp is adjusting CLOCK_MONOTONIC to advance more slowly,
> > the program will appear to use more instructions per second but run
> > more quickly. Of course there are many sources that can cause jitter
> > in performance measurements on modern processors, but I'd like to
> > remove ntp from the list.
>
> What's the consensus on this patch? Everyone OK with it? If so, can you
> please post a new patch with the proper change log. And can everyone
> else give acks. I can take it in my tree.

I can see it being useful for tracing early boot, e.g.
when debugging issues with NTP. So adding it to ftrace
makes sense to me.

Acked-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks,

Mathieu

--
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
http://www.efficios.com
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