Re: [PATCH 0/4] perf_event: introduce 'perf timer' to analyze timer's behavior

Ingo Molnar
2009-12-16T07:46:34Z

* Xiao Guangrong <xiaoguangrong@cn.fujitsu.com> wrote:

>
>
> Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> >>>
> >> Yeah, it has different unit and looks ugly :-(
> >>
> >> but, the problem is we can't get HZ in userspace now, i'll export HZ by proc
> >> or other way and rectify 'perf timer' output in my next work
> >
> > We could export HZ as part of the ftrace event format file, in
> > /debug/tracing/events/timers/ or so. Not sure what the best way would be to do
> > it (without causing runtime overhead in event processing), but we should
> > reduce our reliance on /proc and export such instrumentation information via a
> > single, coherent interface.
>
> Hi ingo,
>
> Um, if we export this value in tracepoint format, it should add for every
> timer's tracepoint.

Not if it's a special timer tracepoint 'HZ' dedicated for this. (We might even
get events through it on dynticks kernels, or on dynamic-sched-tick systems
[in the future] when the scheduler HZ value gets modified - or so.)

> > There's a couple of other 'system settings' values that would be useful to
> > expose in such a way - for example the number of online CPUs. (in fact
> > that could be exposed as a set of online/offline events plus a way to read
> > the current count as well)
>
> How about export those values in debugfs/tracing/*? perf tracepoint self
> depend on this filesystem.

No - in the long run most of those APIs will go away, and what remains are the
ftrace event format descriptors in essence. (Which we then might move to
/proc/events/ or so.)

Ingo