Re: [PATCH 0/3] Add walltime support for ring-buffer

[Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 10:43:11AM +0900, KOSAKI Motohiro wrote:
> Hi Zhaolei,
> 
> > Hi Zhaolei,
> > 
> > Could you not just save the wall time in some 64bit format within the 
> > current timestamp?  Right now there's three clocks that can be used by 
> > ftrace. Two that you can really get two (I need to add access to the 
> > third).  The default clock is sched_clock. But there's an option to get to 
> > global_clock:
> > 
> >  debug/tracing/options/global-clock
> > 
> > # echo 1 > /debug/tracing/options/global-clock
> > 
> > Will enable the global clock. Perhaps we can add a "wall clock" version 
> > that will map the timestamps to the wall clock?
> > 
> > I really hate adding any more fields to the ring buffer headers. That 
> > takes away from the amount that you can record per page.
> 
> I think wall-time recording on every event is too slow. slower tracer
> isn't useful.
> Instead, Can we make pseudo wall-time recording event periodically?
> 
> In nowadays, many workload run on cluster machine environment. Then
> We often need compare different machines tracing log. it mean TSC isn't
> sufficient. but nobody want performance reduce.
> Fortunatelly, ntp time adjustment is not happend so frequently. we
> don't need wall-time on _every_ event.
> 
> Thanks.


Yeah, that would really slow the tracing.

Can't we get a snapshot of the couple (walltime, cpu clock) once
at startup.
Then we can retrieve the walltime when cpu_clock was 0 and compute
the walltime for each traces at output time using the trace timestamp as
a delta?

Thanks,
Frederic.