Re: [RFC 0/5] perf: Create hist_entry groups

[Namhyung Kim <namhyung@gmail.com>]

Hi Don,

On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 16:10:56 -0400, Don Zickus wrote:
> This patchset creates a new layer of hist entry objects called
> hist_entry_groups.  The purpose is to help organize the hist_entries
> into groups before sorting them.  As a result you can gain a
> new perspective on the data by organizing the groups into cpu, pid
> or cacheline.  See patch 5 for sample output.
>
> The main driver for this patchset is to find a way to sort and display
> cacheline data in a way that is useful.  My previous attempts seemed
> hackish until I realized cacheline sorting is really just a collection
> of hist_entries.  Anyway that was my focus for doing this.
>
> The overall idea looks like:
>
> evlist
>   evsel
>     hists
>         hist_entry_group  <<< new object
>           hist_entry
>
>
> Implementing this was not pretty.  I tried to seperate the patches the
> best I could.  But in order for each patch to compile, patch 4 turned into
> a 1400 line diff that is mostly noise.
>
> Also, this patchset breaks most tools (mainly because I don't understand
> all the interactions), hence the RFC.  I mostly tested with 'perf report
>  --stdio' and 'perf mem report --stdio'.
>
> Please let me know if this is an interesting idea to go forward with or not.

I'd like to show you my previous two patchsets.

The first one is for adding --field option and changing the sort
behavior little different [1].  I'm about to send a new version to the
list soon.

I think what you want to do is sorting output by an order of sort keys
not just by the overhead.  So with the patchset applied, you can do it
like:

  $ perf report --field overhead,pid,dso,sym --sort pid

  # Overhead         Command:  Pid      Shared Object                             
  # ........  ....................  .................  ...........................
  #
      32.93%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] intel_idle             
       6.79%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] enqueue_entity         
       1.42%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] update_sd_lb_stats     
       1.30%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] timekeeping_max_deferme
       1.18%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] update_cfs_shares      
       1.07%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] __irq_work_run         
       0.96%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] rcu_check_callbacks    
       0.64%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] irqtime_account_process
       0.50%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] int_sqrt               
       0.47%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] __tick_nohz_idle_enter 
       0.47%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] menu_select            
       0.35%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] run_timer_softirq      
       0.16%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] __perf_event_enable    
       0.12%         swapper:    0  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] rcu_eqs_exit_common.isr
       0.50%      watchdog/6:   37  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] update_sd_lb_stats     
       3.45%            Xorg: 1335  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] schedule               
       6.55%  gnome-terminal: 1903  libc-2.17.so       [.] __strcmp_sse42         
       1.59%         firefox: 2137  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] cpuacct_charge         
       0.50%           emacs: 2473  emacs-24.1         [.] 0x000000000012241a     
       0.38%           emacs: 2473  emacs-24.1         [.] 0x00000000000bfbf7     
       0.31%           emacs: 2473  emacs-24.1         [.] 0x00000000001780dd     
       0.29%           emacs: 2473  emacs-24.1         [.] 0x000000000002eb48     
       4.40%     kworker/7:1:11028  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] generic_exec_single    
       1.30%     kworker/0:0:25667  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] generic_exec_single    
       5.93%     kworker/5:1:26447  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] generic_exec_single    
       2.06%     kworker/1:2:26653  [kernel.kallsyms]  [k] generic_exec_single    

As you can see the output is now sorted by pid value (and then overhead,
dso, sym if previous key resulted in a same value), so swapper (pid 0)
comes first and then watchdog/6, Xorg, and so on..

But it's not guarantee that the hottest pid comes always first on the
output, it just sorted it by pid and it gets the result simply because
the system was idle mostly.  I think you can handle it in your c2c tool
properly though.

Another one I'd like to introduce is somewhat similar to your work.
It's called hierarchy view and groups each entries according to sort
keys [2].  But it only supported --gtk output at that time (in order not
to make the hands dirty unnecessarily ;-) and (thus?) didn't get much
review.  But I think the idea is same and requires less change by just
adding few fields (rb_root) to hist_entry instead of new data structure.

Thanks,
Namhyung


[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/3/19/689
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/5/21/24