From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Will Deacon Subject: Re: [PATCH] trace: extend trace_clock to support arch_arm clock counter Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2016 12:13:47 +0000 Message-ID: <20161206121346.GF2498@arm.com> References: <1480666495-26536-1-git-send-email-sramana@codeaurora.org> <20161202110845.GC8266@arm.com> <5843D587.5010407@codeaurora.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <5843D587.5010407@codeaurora.org> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: "linux-arm-kernel" Errors-To: linux-arm-kernel-bounces+linux-arm-kernel=m.gmane.org@lists.infradead.org To: Srinivas Ramana Cc: catalin.marinas@arm.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org, linux-arm-msm@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-arm-msm@vger.kernel.org On Sun, Dec 04, 2016 at 02:06:23PM +0530, Srinivas Ramana wrote: > On 12/02/2016 04:38 PM, Will Deacon wrote: > >On Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 01:44:55PM +0530, Srinivas Ramana wrote: > >>Extend the trace_clock to support the arch timer cycle > >>counter so that we can get the monotonic cycle count > >>in the traces. This will help in correlating the traces with the > >>timestamps/events in other subsystems in the soc which share > >>this common counter for driving their timers. > > > >I'm not sure I follow this reasoning. What's wrong with nanoseconds? In > >particular, the "perf" trace_clock hangs off sched_clock, which should > >be backed by the architected counter anyway. What does the cycle counter in > >isolation tell you, given that the frequency isn't architected? > > > >I think I'm missing something here. > > > > Having cycle counter would help in the cases where we want to correlate the > time with other subsystems which are outside cpu subsystem. Do you have an example of these subsystems? Can they be used to generate trace data with mainline? > local_clock or even the perf track_clock uses sched_clock which gets > suspended during system suspend. Yes, they are backed up by the > architected counter but they ignore the cycles spent in suspend.i Does mono_raw solve this (also hangs off the architected counter and is supported in the vdso)? > so, when comparing with monotonically increasing cycle counter, other > clocks doesn't help. It seems X86 uses the TSC counter to help such cases. Does this mean we need a way to expose the frequency to userspace, too? Will