Re: [RFC PATCH 00/11] mcount tracing utility

[Tim Bird <tim.bird@am.sony.com>]

Steven Rostedt wrote:
> The following patch series brings to vanilla Linux a bit of the RT kernel
> trace facility. This incorporates the "-pg" profiling option of gcc
> that will call the "mcount" function for all functions called in
> the kernel.
> 
> This patch series implements the code for x86 (32 and 64 bit), but
> other archs can easily be implemented as well.

Steven,

This is really exciting!

As a former maintainer of the (out-of-tree) Kernel Function Trace
system, I really welcome this.  I'm just getting out from under
a backlog of work due to the holiday break, but I'm very interested.
I will take a detailed look at this this week.

I have been working with -finstrument-functions for a few years
now, so I know of a few gotchas with that (e.g. It's currently broken
on ARM EABI with GCC 4.x)  This bug is one of the issues that has
prevented me from attempting to mainline the KFT work this last
year.

Please keep me CC'ed on developments in this area, and let me
know if there are any specific things I can do to help.  I'd be
very interested in helping out with non-x86 arch support.

Regards,
 -- Tim

==============Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Corporation of America
==============