Re: [RFC 00/12] locking: Separate lock tracepoints from lockdep/lock_stat (v1)

Mathieu Desnoyers
2022-02-09T19:29:22Z

----- On Feb 9, 2022, at 2:22 PM, Namhyung Kim namhyung@kernel.org wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On Wed, Feb 9, 2022 at 11:02 AM Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 2/9/22 13:29, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
>> > ----- On Feb 9, 2022, at 1:19 PM, Waiman Long longman@redhat.com wrote:
>> >
>> >> On 2/9/22 04:09, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>> >>> On Tue, Feb 08, 2022 at 10:41:56AM -0800, Namhyung Kim wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>>> Eventually I'm mostly interested in the contended locks only and I
>> >>>> want to reduce the overhead in the fast path. By moving that, it'd be
>> >>>> easy to track contended locks with timing by using two tracepoints.
>> >>> So why not put in two new tracepoints and call it a day?
>> >>>
>> >>> Why muck about with all that lockdep stuff just to preserve the name
>> >>> (and in the process continue to blow up data structures etc..). This
>> >>> leaves distros in a bind, will they enable this config and provide
>> >>> tracepoints while bloating the data structures and destroying things
>> >>> like lockref (which relies on sizeof(spinlock_t)), or not provide this
>> >>> at all.
>> >>>
>> >>> Yes, the name is convenient, but it's just not worth it IMO. It makes
>> >>> the whole proposition too much of a trade-off.
>> >>>
>> >>> Would it not be possible to reconstruct enough useful information from
>> >>> the lock callsite?
>> >>>
>> >> I second that as I don't want to see the size of a spinlock exceeds 4
>> >> bytes in a production system.
>> >>
>> >> Instead of storing additional information (e.g. lock name) directly into
>> >> the lock itself. Maybe we can store it elsewhere and use the lock
>> >> address as the key to locate it in a hash table. We can certainly extend
>> >> the various lock init functions to do that. It will be trickier for
>> >> statically initialized locks, but we can probably find a way to do that too.
>> > If we go down that route, it would be nice if we can support a few different
>> > use-cases for various tracers out there.
>> >
>> > One use-case (a) requires the ability to query the lock name based on its
>> > address as key.
>> > For this a hash table is a good fit. This would allow tracers like ftrace to
>> > output lock names in its human-readable output which is formatted within the
>> > kernel.
>> >
>> > Another use-case (b) is to be able to "dump" the lock { name, address } tuples
>> > into the trace stream (we call this statedump events in lttng), and do the
>> > translation from address to name at post-processing. This simply requires
>> > that this information is available for iteration for both the core kernel
>> > and module locks, so the tracer can dump this information on trace start
>> > and module load.
>> >
>> > Use-case (b) is very similar to what is done for the kernel tracepoints. Based
>> > on this, implementing the init code that iterates on those sections and
>> > populates
>> > a hash table for use-case (a) should be easy enough.
>>
>> Yes, that are good use cases for this type of functionality. I do need
>> to think about how to do it for statically initialized lock first.
>
> Thank you all for the review and good suggestions.
>
> I'm also concerning dynamic allocated locks in a data structure.
> If we keep the info in a hash table, we should delete it when the
> lock is gone. I'm not sure we have a good place to hook it up all.

I was wondering about this use case as well. Can we make it mandatory to
declare the lock "class" (including the name) statically, even though the
lock per-se is allocated dynamically ? Then the initialization of the lock
embedded within the data structure would simply refer to the lock class
definition.

But perhaps I am missing something here.

Thanks,

Mathieu

--
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.