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

Mathieu Desnoyers
2022-02-09T19:32:23Z

----- On Feb 9, 2022, at 2:02 PM, 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.

Tracepoints already solved that problem.

Look at the macro DEFINE_TRACE_FN() in include/linux/tracepoint.h. You will notice that
it statically defines a struct tracepoint in a separate section and a tracepoint_ptr_t
in a __tracepoints_ptrs section.

Then the other parts of the picture are in kernel/tracepoint.c:

extern tracepoint_ptr_t __start___tracepoints_ptrs[];
extern tracepoint_ptr_t __stop___tracepoints_ptrs[];

and kernel/module.c:find_module_sections()

#ifdef CONFIG_TRACEPOINTS
mod->tracepoints_ptrs = section_objs(info, "__tracepoints_ptrs",
sizeof(*mod->tracepoints_ptrs),
&mod->num_tracepoints);
#endif

and the iteration code over kernel and modules in kernel/tracepoint.c.

All you need in addition is in include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h, we add
to the DATA_DATA define an entry such as:

STRUCT_ALIGN(); \
*(__tracepoints) \

and in RO_DATA:

. = ALIGN(8); \
__start___tracepoints_ptrs = .; \
KEEP(*(__tracepoints_ptrs)) /* Tracepoints: pointer array */ \
__stop___tracepoints_ptrs = .;

AFAIU, if you do something similar for a structure that contains your relevant
lock information, it should be straightforward to handle statically initialized
locks.

Thanks,

Mathieu

>
> Thanks,
> Longman

--
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.