Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] perf_events: add support for per-cpu per-cgroup monitoring (v3)

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Thu, 2010-09-09 at 15:05 +0200, Stephane Eranian wrote:
> The cgroup to monitor is designated by passing a file descriptor opened
> on a new per-cgroup file in the cgroup filesystem (perf_event.perf). The
> option must be activated by setting perf_event_attr.cgroup=1 and passing
> a valid file descriptor in perf_event_attr.cgroup_fd. Those are the only
> two ABI extensions. 

> +++ b/include/linux/perf_event.h
> @@ -215,8 +215,9 @@ struct perf_event_attr {
>                                  */
>                                 precise_ip     :  2, /* skid constraint       */
>                                 mmap_data      :  1, /* non-exec mmap data    */
> +                               cgroup         :  1, /* cgroup aggregation    */
>  
> -                               __reserved_1   : 46;
> +                               __reserved_1   : 45;
>  
>         union {
>                 __u32           wakeup_events;    /* wakeup every n events */
> @@ -226,6 +227,8 @@ struct perf_event_attr {
>         __u32                   bp_type;
>         __u64                   bp_addr;
>         __u64                   bp_len;
> +
> +       int                     cgroup_fd;
>  };
>  
>  /*

I'm not sure I like this much.. so we attach to {pid,cpu}, for nodes we
can use cpu_to_node(cpu), which would suggest to use
cgroup_of_task(pid), except that a task can be part of multiple cgroups,
so its not unique.

One thing we could do is pass this cgroup identifier in the pid field
and use PERF_FLAG_CGROUP or something. Currently the syscall signature
uses pid_t, but I think we can safely change that to int.

You create a special new file in the cgroup stuff, I'm not sure about
that either, but its not something I feel too strongly about, why
wouldn't a fd of any file or even directory of that cgroup work? Do the
cgroup people have an opinion?