Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Generic IPI sending tracepoint

Valentin Schneider
2022-10-11T16:17:04Z

+Cc Douglas

On 07/10/22 17:01, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> Hi Valentin,
>
> On Fri, Oct 07, 2022 at 04:41:40PM +0100, Valentin Schneider wrote:
>> Background
>> ==========
>>
>> As for the targeted CPUs, the existing tracepoint does export them, albeit in
>> cpumask form, which is quite inconvenient from a tooling perspective. For
>> instance, as far as I'm aware, it's not possible to do event filtering on a
>> cpumask via trace-cmd.
>
> https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/trace-cmd-set.1.html
>
> -f filter
> Specify a filter for the previous event. This must come after
> a -e. This will filter what events get recorded based on the
> content of the event. Filtering is passed to the kernel
> directly so what filtering is allowed may depend on what
> version of the kernel you have. Basically, it will let you
> use C notation to check if an event should be processed or
> not.
>
> ==, >=, <=, >, <, &, |, && and ||
>
> The above are usually safe to use to compare fields.
>
> This looks overkill to me (consider large number of bits set in mask).
>
> +#define trace_ipi_send_cpumask(callsite, mask) do { \
> + if (static_key_false(&__tracepoint_ipi_send_cpu.key)) { \
> + int cpu; \
> + for_each_cpu(cpu, mask) \
> + trace_ipi_send_cpu(callsite, cpu); \
> + } \
> +} while (0)
>

Indeed, I expected pushback on this :-)

I went for this due to how much simpler an int is to process/use compared
to a cpumask. There is the trigger example I listed above, but the
consumption of the trace event itself as well.

Consider this event collected on an arm64 QEMU instance (output from trace-cmd)

<...>-234 [001] 37.251567: ipi_raise: target_mask=00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000004 (Function call interrupts)

That sort of formatting has been an issue downstream for things like LISA
[1] where events are aggregated into Pandas tables, and we need to play
silly games for performance reason because bitmasks aren't a native Python
type.

I had a look at libtraceevent to see how this data is exposed and if the
answer would be better tooling:

tep_get_field_val() just yields an unsigned long long of value 0x200018,
which AFAICT is just the [length, offset] thing associated with dynamic
arrays. Not really usable, and I don't see anything exported in the lib to
extract and use those values.

tep_get_field_raw() is better, it handles the dynamic array for us and
yields a pointer to the cpumask array at the tail of the record. With that
it's easy to get an output such as: cpumask[size=32]=[4,0,0,0,]. Still,
this isn't a native type for many programming languages.

In contrast, this is immediately readable and consumable by userspace tools

<...>-234 [001] 37.250882: ipi_send_cpu: callsite=__smp_call_single_queue+0x5c target_cpu=2

Thinking out loud, it makes way more sense to record a cpumask in the
tracepoint, but perhaps we could have a postprocessing step to transform
those into N events each targeting a single CPU?

[1]: https://github.com/ARM-software/lisa/blob/37b51243a94b27ea031ff62bb4ce818a59a7f6ef/lisa/trace.py#L4756

>
>>
>> Because of the above points, this is introducing a new tracepoint.
>>
>> Patches
>> =======
>>
>> This results in having trace events for:
>>
>> o smp_call_function*()
>> o smp_send_reschedule()
>> o irq_work_queue*()
>>
>> This is incomplete, just looking at arm64 there's more IPI types that aren't covered:
>>
>> IPI_CPU_STOP,
>> IPI_CPU_CRASH_STOP,
>> IPI_TIMER,
>> IPI_WAKEUP,
>>
>> ... But it feels like a good starting point.
>
> Can't you have a single tracepoint (or variant with cpumask) that would
> cover such cases as well?
>
> Maybe (as parameters for tracepoint):
>
> * type (reschedule, smp_call_function, timer, wakeup, ...).
>
> * function address: valid for smp_call_function, irq_work_queue
> types.
>

That's a good point, I wasn't sure about having a parameter serving as
discriminant for another, but the function address would be either valid or
NULL which is fine. So perhaps:
o callsite (i.e. _RET_IP_), serves as type
o address of callback tied to IPI, if any
o target CPUs

>> Another thing worth mentioning is that depending on the callsite, the _RET_IP_
>> fed to the tracepoint is not always useful - generic_exec_single() doesn't tell
>> you much about the actual callback being sent via IPI, so there might be value
>> in exploding the single tracepoint into at least one variant for smp_calls.
>
> Not sure i grasp what you mean by "exploding the single tracepoint...",
> but yes knowing the function or irq work function is very useful.
>

Sorry; I meant having several "specialized" tracepoints instead of a single one.