Re: [PATCH] perf record: Add snapshot mode support for perf's regular events

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>]

* Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> wrote:

> > But yes, we can do that userspace ring buffer when we really need it. At very 
> > first we can start working on perf side and assume overwrite mode is ready.
> 
> I don't think Peter asked for much: pick up the patch he has already written and 
> use it, to have an even lower overhead always-enabled background tracing mode of 
> perf.
> 
> Resizing shouldn't be much of an issue with existing features: if events start 
> overflowing or some other threshold for dynamic increase of the ring-buffer is 
> met then the daemon should open a new set of events with a larger ring-buffer, 
> and close the old events once the new tracing ring-buffer is up and running.
> 
> Use event multiplexing to output all interesting events into the same single 
> (per CPU) ring-buffer.

Btw., there's another trick we could use to support ftrace-alike workflows even 
better: we could expose a task's active perf ring-buffers under /proc/<PID>/ and 
could make it readable.

So if an overwrite-mode background tracing session is running, you don't even have 
to signal it to capture the ring-buffer: just open the ring-buffer fd in procfs, 
under /proc/XYZ/perf/ring-buffers/5.trace or so, and dump its current contents, 
assuming the task doing that has sufficient permissions - i.e. 
ptrace_may_access().

We could even pretty-print some very basic version of the records from the kernel, 
via /proc/XYZ/perf/ring-buffers/5.txt, to support a tooling-less tracing modes. 
This way perf based tracing could be supported even on systems that have no 
writable filesystems.

I.e. in this regard perf can be made to match ftrace's tracing workflow as well - 
in addition to the more traditional perf profiling workflow we all love and know!

Thanks,

	Ingo