Re: [RFC][PATCH 2/2] perf: Add per event clockid support

[Adrian Hunter]

On 20/02/15 16:29, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> While thinking on the whole clock discussion it occured to me we have
> two distinct uses of time:
> 
>  1) the tracking of event/ctx/cgroup enabled/running/stopped times
>     which includes the self-monitoring support in struct
>     perf_event_mmap_page.
> 
>  2) the actual timestamps visible in the data records.
> 
> And we've been conflating them.
> 
> The first is all about tracking time deltas, nobody should really care
> in what time base that happens, its all relative information, as long
> as its internally consistent it works.
> 
> The second however is what people are worried about when having to
> merge their data with external sources. And here we have the
> discussion on MONOTONIC vs MONOTONIC_RAW etc..
> 
> Where MONOTONIC is good for correlating between machines (static
> offset), MONOTNIC_RAW is required for correlating against a fixed rate
> hardware clock.
> 
> This means configurability; now 1) makes that hard because it needs to
> be internally consistent across groups of unrelated events; which is
> why we had to have a global perf_clock().
> 
> However, for 2) it doesn't really matter, perf itself doesn't care
> what it writes into the buffer.
> 
> The below patch makes the distinction between these two cases by
> adding perf_event_clock() which is used for the second case. It
> further makes this configurable on a per-event basis, but adds a few
> sanity checks such that we cannot combine events with different clocks
> in confusing ways.
> 
> And since we then have per-event configurability we might as well
> retain the 'legacy' behaviour as a default.

OK by me.

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