Re: [PATCH 5/5] proc: export more page flags in /proc/kpageflags

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Tue Apr 28 2009 - 08:44:24 EST



* KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 2009/4/28 Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx>:
> >
> > * Pekka Enberg <penberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi!
> >>
> >> 2009/4/28 KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> >> >> I guess the main question here is whether this approach will scale to
> >> >> something like kmalloc() or the page allocator in production
> >> >> environments. For any serious workload, the frequency of events is
> >> >> going to be pretty high.
> >> >
> >> > Immediate Values patch series makes zero-overhead to tracepoint
> >> > while it's not used.
> >> >
> >> > So, We have to implement to stop collect stastics way. it restore
> >> > zero overhead world.
> >> > We don't lose any performance by trace.
> >>
> >> Sure but I meant the _enabled_ case here. kmalloc() (and the page
> >> allocator to some extent) is very performance sensitive in many
> >> workloads so you probably don't want to use tracepoints if you're
> >> collecting some overall statistics (i.e. tracing all events) like
> >> we do here.
> >
> > That's where 'collect current state' kind of tracepoints would help
> > - they could be used even without enabling any of the other
> > tracepoints. And they'd still be in a coherent whole with the
> > dynamic-events tracepoints.
> >
> > So i'm not arguing against these techniques at all - and we can move
> > on a wide scale from zero-overhead to lots-of-tracing-enabled models
> > - what i'm arguing against is the splintering.
>
> umm.
> I guess Pekka and you talk about different thing.
>
> if tracepoint is ON, tracepoint makes one function call. but few
> hot spot don't have patience to one function call overhead.
>
> scheduler stat and slab stat are one of good example, I think.
>
> I really don't want convert slab_stat and sched_stat to ftrace
> base stastics. currently it don't need extra function call and it
> only touch per-cpu variable. So, a overhead is extream small.
>
> Unfortunately, tracepoint still don't reach this extream
> performance.

I understand that - please see my "[rfc] object collection tracing"
reply in this thread, for a more detailed description about what i
meant under 'object state tracing'.

Ingo
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