Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: page_alloc.c: Add tracepoints for slowpath

[Rik van Riel]

On Wed, 2016-07-27 at 20:44 +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Wed 27-07-16 14:16:22, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, 2016-07-27 at 18:33 +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > 
> > > On Wed 27-07-16 10:47:59, Janani Ravichandran wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > Add tracepoints to the slowpath code to gather some
> > > > information.
> > > > The tracepoints can also be used to find out how much time was
> > > > spent in
> > > > the slowpath.
> > > I do not think this is a right thing to measure.
> > > __alloc_pages_slowpath
> > > is more a code organization thing. The fast path might perform an
> > > expensive operations like zone reclaim (if node_reclaim_mode > 0)
> > > so
> > > these trace point would miss it.
> > It doesn't look like it does. The fast path either
> > returns an allocated page to the caller, or calls
> > into the slow path.
> I must be missing something here but what prevents
> __alloc_pages_nodemask->get_page_from_freelist from doing
> zone_reclaim?

You are right!

Guess the script may need to collect all the
tracing output from __alloc_pages_nodemask on
up, and then filter the output so only the
interesting (read: long duration) traces get
dumped out to a file.

-- 
All rights reversed

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part