Re: [patch] profile enhancements, please read!

From: John V . Baboval (baboval@mclinux.com)
Date: Fri May 26 2000 - 09:59:53 EST


On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 02:05:24AM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> kmalloc cannot allocate >128K, and that is very unreliable; better use vmalloc
> for >2*PAGE_SIZE

I wasn't sure about the maximum size you could kmalloc... Is the 128K limit
based on the page size in some way, or is that a hard limit across all
platforms. I'd like to try for the kmalloc if there's any hope of it
succeeding at all so that the performance hit the profiler causes is
minimized. Unfortunatly, with the average kernel build, a profile buffer
will never be < 128K if you want decent resolution in your profile...

> I also think the cleanup function does not check if all resources were
> really allocated (which can be triggered with sysctl)

The prof_switch function tests wether the prof_buffer is NULL before trying
to free any resources. If the allocation failed, prof_buffer should remain
NULL, so testing for prof_type == 0 shouldn't be necissary.

>
> I also have my doubts that the per process name is that useful, because
> the linux kernel does a lot of things asynchronously outside process context.

Do you have any suggestions as to something that would be more helpful for
finding performance bottlenecks on production machines with multiple
functions? I'm guessing that you're thinking of things like kswapd as
something that is run outside of the processes context...

-- 

-John <baboval@missioncriticallinux.com>

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