Re: [PATCH v6 3/4] tracing: Add trace_irqsoff tracepoints

[Binoy Jayan]

Hi Thomas,

Sorry for the late reply. I was trying out some way to do it the way
you suggested.
Tried to talk to Carsten regarding the hrtimer latency patch but was unable to.

On 8 September 2016 at 13:36, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Sep 2016, Binoy Jayan wrote:
>> This captures only the latencies introduced by disabled irqs and
>> preemption. Additional per process data has to be captured to calculate
>> the effective latencies introduced for individual processes.
>
> And what is the additional per process data and how is it captured and
> used?

This is the patch which would touch the scheduler code which I did not
want to do.
I was trying to achieve the same using kprobes but did not get around to make it
work with the histograms.

>> +static inline void latency_preempt_timing_start(enum latency_type ltype)
>> +{
>> +     this_cpu_write(lat_ts[ltype], (cycle_t) trace_clock_local());
>
> What is this silly type cast for? Why can't you just use u64 ?

>> +static inline void latency_preempt_timing_stop(enum latency_type type)
>> +{
>> +     trace_latency_preempt(type,
>> +             (cycle_t) trace_clock_local() - this_cpu_read(lat_ts[type]));
>
> And then of course you use a completely different data type in the trace
> itself.

This has been changed.

>> +DECLARE_EVENT_CLASS(latency_template,
>> +     TP_PROTO(int ltype, cycles_t latency),
>
> Are you sure, that you know what you are doing here? If yes, then please
> explain it in form of comments so mere mortals can understand it as well.

Added comments for the same.

>>  /* start and stop critical timings used to for stoppage (in idle) */
>>  void start_critical_timings(void)
>>  {
>> +     if (unlikely(trace_latency_preempt_enabled()))
>> +             latency_preempt_timing_start(LT_CRITTIME);
>
> I doubt, that this conditional is less expensive than a simple
> unconditional store to a per cpu variable.

This is changed as well.

>> @@ -431,6 +451,9 @@ void stop_critical_timings(void)
>>  {
>>       if (preempt_trace() || irq_trace())
>>               stop_critical_timing(CALLER_ADDR0, CALLER_ADDR1);
>> +
>> +     if (unlikely(trace_latency_preempt_enabled()))
>> +             latency_preempt_timing_stop(LT_CRITTIME);
>
> And this is silly as well. You can put the whole evaluation into the trace
> event assignement so the tracer core will handle that conditional.

I hope this can be done for "time_hardirqs_off" and "trace_preempt_off"
as well.

> Aside of that it is silly to evaluate trace_clock_local() for the actual
> tracepoint simply because that time is already stored in the tracepoint
> itself. The flow here is:
>
>         event = trace_event_buffer_lock_reserve();
>         entry = ring_buffer_event_data(event);
>         { <assign>; }  <-- Here we assign the entries by the __field and
>                            __array macros.
>
>
> So you should talk to Steven about having a way to retrieve that time from
> entry itself in a generic way.
>

Steven mentioned that the timestamp in the ring buffer is in the
offset form and also
it may not be equivalent to trace_clock_local() time. I also tried
using the timestamp
from the per cpu trace data but it did not seem to provide correct
value for the timestamp.

struct trace_array_cpu *data =
per_cpu_ptr(irqsoff_trace->trace_buffer.data, cpu);
data->preempt_timestamp

Thanks,
Binoy