Re: [PATCH v2 0/7] perf trace pagefaults

From: David Ahern
Date: Mon Jun 23 2014 - 10:00:25 EST


On 6/20/14, 9:24 AM, Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
Right now it is too simple, but I was starting to work (when you jumped
right in with your work making me stop and go on testing/reviewing :) )
on making it more generic so that we could defer pretty printing the
arguments from sys_enter to sys_exit, when, by then, we would already
have an association of a user level pointer in some specific thread to
its contents.

This will allow us to to resolve the pathname pointer in things like
open() (i.e. not just after that, in the fd syscalls (write, etc)) and
as well any other pointer of interest.

By librarizing 'builtin-probe.c', that now uses lots of global
variables, etc, we would be able to insert probes where we want them to
capture the contents of pointers, check if the probes are already in
place, use just the ones that we managed to insert (i.e. that were not
invalid because the places where we wanted them to be were changed
across kernel releases, etc).

I.e. no need for actual tracepoints from day one, just wannabe
tracepoints using whatever probe inserting gizmo the kprobes_tracer used
by 'perf probe' now thinks its best to use.

Combine that with using DWARF descriptions (that could be pre cached
into something like CTF (the DTrace kind of CTF) or similar) like pahole
does and we would mostly automatically do all this work of prettyfing
syscall parameters.

</handwave>

That was so much handwaving you could keep cool at a World Cup game. :-)

David

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