Re: [PATCH v6 1/6] perf header: Record first sample time and last sample time in perf file header

[Jin, Yao]

On 11/22/2017 12:38 AM, Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
> Em Mon, Nov 06, 2017 at 08:21:06PM +0800, Jin Yao escreveu:
> > perf report/script/... have a --time option to limit the time range
> > of output. That's very useful to slice large traces, e.g. when processing
> > the output of perf script for some analysis.
> >
> > But right now --time only supports absolute time. Also there is no fast
> > way to get the start/end times of a given trace except for looking at it.
> > This makes it hard to e.g. only decode the first half of the trace, which
> > is useful for parallelization of scripts
> >
> > Another problem is that perf records are variable size and there is no
> > synchronization mechanism. So the only way to find the last sample reliably
> > would be to walk all samples. But we want to avoid that in perf report/...
> > because it is already quite expensive. That is why storing the first sample
> > time and last sample time in perf record is better.
> >
> > This patch creates a new header feature type HEADER_SAMPLE_TIME and related
> > ops. Save the first sample time and the last sample time to the feature
> > section in perf file header
>
> I'll add a clarification here, right after your text:
>
> ". That will be done when, for instance, processing build-ids, where we
> already have to process all samples to create the build-id table, take
> advantage of that to further amortize that processing by storing
> HEADER_SAMPLE_TIME to make 'perf report/script' faster when using
> --time."

Thanks Arnaldo! The clarification is good!

Thanks
Jin Yao