Re: [RFC][PATCH 4/5] tracing/filters: Provide basic regex support

Peter Zijlstra
2009-08-07T08:11:57Z

On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 23:14 -0500, Tom Zanussi wrote:

> This a nice new feature - I considered doing it (not complete regexp
> support, just * in strings) for the original patch, but ran out of time
> - glad you added it.
>
> I still think it makes sense to have some basic support for * in the
> regular filter file, so I'd vote for getting rid of the filter_regex
> file for now and just adding * support with the antislash escape to the
> regular filter file. If you later wanted to add more full-fledged
> regexp support and it didn't make sense to do it in the regular filter
> file, then you could go crazy and add the filter_regex later...

I'll have to second this, /debug doesn't provide an ABI and having
multiple ways of expressing filters is just a pain.

I'm thinking of adding this filter capability to the perf tracepoints by
passing along a filter expression, having multiple ways of writing this
expression is just going to cause confusion.