Re: malloc() tracing in perf?

Pekka Enberg
2009-08-06T08:20:48Z

Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 10:48 +0300, Pekka Enberg wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> It's me again :-).
>>
>> I have a little user-space application that is pretty memory hungry and
>> I want to understand why. I started to google around for a memory
>> profiler or a malloc() tracer but didn't seem to find anything really
>> useful.
>>
>> But then it hit me, why can't I have kmemtrace + perf but for
>> user-space? Something like the "Malloc Trace" shown here:
>>
>> http://developer.apple.com/documentation/developertools/conceptual/SharkUserGuide/OtherProfilingandTracingTechniques/OtherProfilingandTracingTechniques.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40005233-CH6-SW17
>>
>> Does this sound like something that could/should be part of "perf"? How
>> would all this work anyway? Can we intercept malloc() and free()
>> somehow? Where would the data be pushed? Am I just going perf-crazy and
>> trying to turn it into a swiss army knife because it's so easy to use?-)
>
> OK, you just trod into a wasp's nest :-)
>
>
> That sounds like uprobes, the equivalent of kprobes but for userspace.
>
> I seem to have heard people are working on such a thing, but I can't
> seem to find a single LKML post with 'uprobe' in the subject in the past
> two years or something (except for MTUprobe) -- so I guess its not
> really going anywhere any fast.
>
> Now doing probes on userspace is hard because you need to know more
> about the userspace bits than a kernel really ought to be interested in.
>
> Then again, the only way to extract bits from userspace is to stop it --
> now one could do that using [pu]trace and have some monitoring app prod
> at it like any other debugger would, and I think this is the approach
> suggested by some (hch iirc).
>
> Others seem to think we ought to stuff all this into the kernel, I can
> only imagine the pain that will cause, since you need to teach the
> kernel about these instrumentation sites' context, so I can only imagine
> it'd be through a kernel module interface much like system-tap does
> (they would be doing the in-kernel bit).
>
> Then there are the tracer folks who also want to collect userspace
> traces. Some have proposed a sys_trace() call, others want to play silly
> games with mmap() and then there is the uprobe idea. Others (tglx and
> me) proposed letting userspace log itself and post-merge all the various
> trace buffers to get a complete picture.
>
>
> Anyway, like you say, it has uses (potentially very powerful ones),
> Sun/Apple do it with Dtrace, Linux wants it but I don't think we quite
> agreed on how to do it :-)
>
>
> And here I see LKML isn't on the CC list, perhaps we should?

Oh sure, lets do that, half of the people seem to be on the CC anyway
now :-).

Pekka