Re: [RFC PATCH 00/17] perf: Detached events

[Borislav Petkov]

On Tue, Sep 05, 2017 at 04:30:09PM +0300, Alexander Shishkin wrote:
> Detached events: a new flag to the perf syscall makes a 'detached' event,
> which exists after its file descriptor is released. Not all detached events
> are per-thread AUX events: this tries to take into account the need for
> system-wide persistent events too.

Nice, thanks!

> (2) Need to be able to kill those events, so they need to be accessible
> after they are created.
> Event files: detached events exist as files in tracefs (at the moment), can
> be opened/mmaped/read/removed.

I guess I'll see when I continue reading but I remember us doing ioctls
on the event fd.

> (6) Ring buffer memory accounting needs to take this new arrangement into
> account: one user can use up at most NR_CPUS * buffer_size memory at any
> given point in time.
> Only account the first such event and undo the accounting when the last
> event is gone.

... and I guess we probably shouldn't allow the user to create too many
events and shoot herself in the OOM-foot.

> (7) We'll also need to supply all the things that the [PT] decoder normally
> finds out via sysfs attributes, like clock ratios, capabilities, etc so that
> it also finds its way into the core dump file.
> "PMU info" structure is appended to the user page.
> 
> I've also hack the perf tool to support all this, all these things can be
> found at [1]. I'm not posting the tooling patches though, them being
> thoroughly ugly and proof-of-concept. In short, perf record will create
> detached events with '--detached' and afterwards will open detached events
> via their path in tracefs.

Sounds nice. I'd need to test all that just so I can be able to create
detached RAS events (which are tracepoints) with it.

Thanks.

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
    Boris.

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