Re: [PATCH][1/4] Completely out of line spinlocks / i386

[Keith Owens <kaos@ocs.com.au>]

On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 17:53:29 -0400 (EDT), 
Zwane Mwaikambo <zwane@linuxpower.ca> wrote:
>With the readprofile and oprofile changes it's still not that easy to
>determine which locks are being contended as the samples generally are
>being charged to the function the lock is being contended in. So some
>investigation has to be done when looking at profiles. This could be
>remedied by making the valid PC range include data or, preferably, moving
>spinlock variables into a special section. That way we can simply
>report back the lock word during sampling.

kdb attempts to decode the lock address on ia64.  A lot of the time,
the lock is dynamically allocated (think inodes) so symbol lookup is no
good.  I find that the decoding the lock is useful but not required,
the function that contended on the lock is more interesting.