Re: [PATCH v3 0/6] perf auxtrace: Support AUX pause and resume with BPF

[Leo Yan <leo.yan@arm.com>]

Hi Adrian,

On Mon, Jul 28, 2025 at 08:02:51PM +0300, Adrian Hunter wrote:
> On 25/07/2025 12:59, Leo Yan wrote:
> > This series extends Perf for fine-grained tracing by using BPF program
> > to pause and resume AUX tracing. The BPF program can be attached to
> > tracepoints (including ftrace tracepoints and dynamic tracepoints, like
> > kprobe, kretprobe, uprobe and uretprobe).
> 
> Using eBPF to pause/resume AUX tracing seems like a great idea.
> 
> AFAICT with this patch set, there is just support for pause/resume
> much like what could be done directly without eBPF, so I wonder if you
> could share a bit more on how you see this evolving, and what your
> future plans are?

IIUC, here you mean the tool can use `perf probe` to firstly create
probes, then enable tracepoints as PMU event for AUX pause and resume.

I would say a benefit from this series is users can use a single
command to create probes and bind eBPF program for AUX pause and
resume in one go.

To be honest, at current stage, I don't have clear idea for expanding
this feature. But a clear requirement is: AUX trace data usually is
quite huge, after initial analysis, developers might want to focus
on specific function profiling (based on function entry and exit) or
specific period (E.g., start tracing when hit a tracepoing and stop when
hit another tracepoint).

eBPF program is powerful. Basically, we can extend it in two different
dimensions. One direction is we can easily attach the eBPF program to more
kernel modules, like networking, storage, etc. Another direction is to
improve the eBPF program itself as a filter for better fine-grained
tracing, so far we only support limited filtering based on CPU ID or PID,
we also can extend the filtering based on time, event types, etc.

Thanks,
Leo