Re: Enhanced profiling support (was Re: vm lock contention reduction)

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>]

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, John Levon wrote:
>
> > I'd rather have some generic hooks (a notion of a "profile buffer" and
> > events that cause us to have to synchronize with it, like process
> > switches, mmap/munmap - oprofile wants these too), and some generic helper
> > routines for profiling (turn any eip into a "dentry + offset" pair
> > together with ways to tag specific dentries as being "worthy" of
> > profiling).
>
> How do you see such dentry names being exported to user-space for the
> profiling daemon to access ? The current oprofile scheme is, um, less
> than ideal ...

Ok, I'll outline my personal favourite interface, but I'd also better
point out that while I've thought a bit about what I'd like to have and
how it could be implemented in the kernel, I have _not_ actually tried any
of it out, much less thought about what the user level stuff really needs.

Anyway, here goes a straw-man:

 - I'd associate each profiling event with a dentry/offset pair, simply
   because that's the highest-level thing that the kernel knows about and
   that is "static".

 - I'd suggest that the profiler explicitly mark the dentries it wants
   profiled, so that the kernel can throw away events that we're not
   interested in. The marking function would return a cookie to user
   space, and increment the dentry count (along with setting the
   "profile" flag in the dentry)

 - the "cookie" (which would most easily just be the kernel address of the
   dentry) would be the thing that we give to user-space (along with
   offset) on profile read. The user app can turn it back into a filename.

Whether it is the original "mark this file for profiling" phase that saves
away the cookie<->filename association, or whether we also have a system
call for "return the path of this cookie", I don't much care about.
Details, details.

Anyway, what would be the preferred interface from user level?

		Linus

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