Re: [PATCH] perf: Store active software events in a hashlist

[Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 11:04:53AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 17:27 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Mon, 2010-04-05 at 16:08 +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > > Each time a software event triggers, we need to walk through
> > > the entire list of events from the current cpu and task contexts
> > > to retrieve a running perf event that matches.
> > > We also need to check a matching perf event is actually counting.
> > > 
> > > This walk is wasteful and makes the event fast path scaling
> > > down with a growing number of events running on the same
> > > contexts.
> > > 
> > > To solve this, we store the running perf events in a hashlist to
> > > get an immediate access to them against their type:event_id when
> > > they trigger. 
> > 
> > So we have a hash-table per-cpu, each event takes a ref on the hash
> > table, when the thing is empty we free it.
> > 
> > When the event->cpu == -1 (all cpus) we take a ref on all possible cpu's
> > hash-table (should be online I figure, but that requires adding a
> > hotplug handler).
> > 
> > Then on event enable/disable we actually add the event to the hash-table
> > belonging to the cpu the event/task gets scheduled on, since each event
> > can only ever be active on one cpu.
> > 
> > Right?
> > 
> > So looks good, altough I think we want to do that online/hotplug thing.
> 
> Alternatively, you can simply but the hash table into the per-cpu
> structure and not allocate it, its only a single page (half a page if
> you use 32bit or actually use 8 bits.


As you prefer. This would indeed make it more simple, but that would also
make these pages unused most of the time.