Re: Unified tracing buffer

[Mathieu Desnoyers <compudj@krystal.dyndns.org>]

* Peter Zijlstra (a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl) wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-09-20 at 05:03 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> 
> > Oh, and all commands should start with the namespace.
> > 
> >   ring_buffer_alloc()
> >   ring_buffer_free()
> >   ring_buffer_record_event()
> 
> I really think we should separate the ringbuffer management from the
> event stuff.
> 

Sure, I am strongly in favor of separating those two, given they
represent two different things. However, the requirement I have heard at
KS2008 was to provide 

- Unified buffering mechanism
- Timestamps synchronized across all buffers
- Unified event IDs management, so events from various sources could be
  shared between tools.
- As of my understanding, unified event structure, which can be exported
  to userspace and be shared across different tools.
- Unified buffer control/management mechanism.

These all represent different infrastructure parts, but are all needed
if we want tools to be able to share the data exported through those
buffers.

Relay is a good example of having only a _single_ of these layers in
common : there is currently no way the different relay users can share
the data they collect because they have simply no idea how others
structure their data.

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
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