Re: [RFC] perf_events: support for uncore a.k.a. nest units
From: Corey Ashford
Date: Thu Jan 28 2010 - 13:01:13 EST
On 01/28/2010 02:57 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
On Wed, 2010-01-27 at 11:50 -0800, Corey Ashford wrote:
On 1/27/2010 2:28 AM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Corey Ashford<cjashfor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 1/21/2010 11:13 AM, Corey Ashford wrote:
On 1/20/2010 11:21 PM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Corey Ashford<cjashfor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I really think we need some sort of data structure which is passed
>from the
kernel to user space to represent the topology of the system, and give
useful information to be able to identify each PMU node. Whether this is
done with a sysfs-style tree, a table in a file, XML, etc... it doesn't
really matter much, but it needs to be something that can be parsed
relatively easily and *contains just enough information* for the user
to be
able to correctly choose PMUs, and for the kernel to be able to
relate that
back to actual PMU hardware.
The right way would be to extend the current event description under
/debug/tracing/events with hardware descriptors and (maybe) to
formalise this
into a separate /proc/events/ or into a separate filesystem.
The advantage of this is that in the grand scheme of things we
_really_ dont
want to limit performance events to 'hardware' hierarchies, or to
devices/sysfs, some existing /proc scheme, or any other arbitrary (and
fundamentally limiting) object enumeration.
We want a unified, logical enumeration of all events and objects that
we care
about from a performance monitoring and analysis point of view, shaped
for the
purpose of and parsed by perf user-space. And since the current event
descriptors are already rather rich as they enumerate all sorts of
things:
- tracepoints
- hw-breakpoints
- dynamic probes
etc., and are well used by tooling we should expand those with real
hardware
structure.
This is an intriguing idea; I like the idea of generalizing all of this
info into one structure.
So you think that this structure should contain event info as well? If
these structures are created by the kernel, I think that would
necessitate placing large event tables into the kernel, which is
something I think we'd prefer to avoid because of the amount of memory
it would take. Keep in mind that we need not only event names, but event
descriptions, encodings, attributes (e.g. unit masks), attribute
descriptions, etc. I suppose the kernel could read a file from the file
system, and then add this info to the tree, but that just seems bad. Are
there existing places in the kernel where it reads a user space file to
create a user space pseudo filesystem?
I think keeping event naming in user space, and PMU naming in kernel
space might be a better idea: the kernel exposes the available PMUs to
user space via some structure, and a user space library tries to
recognize the exposed PMUs and provide event lists and other needed
info. The perf tool would use this library to be able to list available
events to users.
Perhaps another way of handing this would be to have the kernel dynamically
load a specific "PMU kernel module" once it has detected that it has a
particular PMU in the hardware. The module would consist only of a data
structure, and a simple API to access the event data. This way, only only
the PMUs that actually exist in the hardware would need to be loaded into
memory, and perhaps then only temporarily (just long enough to create the
pseudo fs nodes).
Still, though, since it's a pseudo fs, all of that event data would be
taking up kernel memory.
Another model, perhaps, would be to actually write this data out to a real
file system upon every boot up, so that it wouldn't need to be held in
memory. That seems rather ugly and time consuming, though.
I dont think memory consumption is a problem at all. The structure of the
monitored hardware/software state is information we _want_ the kernel to
provide, mainly because there's no unified repository for user-space to get
this info from.
If someone doesnt want it on some ultra-embedded box then sure a .config
switch can be provided to allow it to be turned off.
Ingo
Ok, just so that we quantify things a bit, let's say I have 20 different types
of PMUs totalling 2000 different events, each of which has a name and text
description, averaging 300 characters. Along with that, there's let's say 4
64-bit words of metadata per event describing encoding, which attributes apply
to the event, and any other needed info. I don't know how much memory each
pseudo fs node takes up. Let me guess and say 128 bytes for each event node
(the amount taken for the PMU nodes would be negligible compared with the event
nodes).
So thats 2000 * (300 + 32 + 128) bytes ~= 920KB of memory.
Let's assume that the correct event module can be loaded dynamically, so that we
don't need to have all of the possible event sets for a particular arch kernel
build.
Any opinions on whether allocating this amount of kernel memory would be
acceptable? It seems like a lot of kernel memory to me, but I come from an
embedded systems background. Granted, most systems are going to use a fraction
of that amount of memory (<100KB) due to having far fewer PMUs and therefore
fewer distinct event types.
There's at least one more dimension to this. Let's say I have 16 uncore PMUs
all of the same type, each of which has, for example 8 events. As a very crude
pseudo fs, let's say we have a structure like this:
/sys/devices/pmus/
uncore_pmu0/
event0/ (path name to here is the name of the pmu and event)
description (file)
applicable_attributes (file)
event1/
description
applicable_attributes
event2/
...
event7/
...
uncore_pmu1/
event0/
description
applicable_attributes
...
...
uncore_pmu15/
...
I really don't like this. The the cpu->uncore map is fixed by the
topology of the machine, which is already available in /sys some place.
Lets simply use the cpu->node mapping and use PERF_TYPE_NODE{,_RAW} or
something like that. We can start with 2 generic events for that type,
local/remote memory accesses and take it from there.
I don't quite get what you're saying here. Perhaps you are thinking
that all uncore units are associated with a particular cpu node, or a
set of cpu nodes? And that there's only one uncore unit per cpu (or set
of cpus) that needs to be addressed, i.e. no ambiguity?
That is not going to be the case for all systems. We can have uncore
units that are associated with the entire system, for example PMUs in an
I/O device. And we can have multiple uncore units of a particular
type, for example multiple vector coprocessors, each with its own PMU,
and are associated with a single cpu or a set of cpus.
perf_events needs an addressing scheme that covers these cases.
- Corey
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