Re: [GIT PULL 0/7] perf/core fixes and improvements

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo]

Em Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 09:14:57AM +0200, Ingo Molnar escreveu:
> * Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 	The TUI now should be much closer to the old 'perf top' stdio
> > visual/experience, more on that vein in the next pull req.

> Pulled, thanks Arnaldo.
> 
> The way the TUI now follows terminal colors is really nice. There's a 
> few regressions that sneaked in, and there's also still a few rough 
> edges as well:

>  - in callq following if i exit a secondary annotation screen via 'q' 
>    or left-arrow, it does not jump back to the callq line as it did 
>    earlier.

Oh, I noticed this at some point, but couldn't quickly reproduce as I
was concentrated on something else, but I think its case of using
'continue' versus 'break' when coming back from the nested annotation
browser, so that we don't change the current selection, will check that
now.
 
>  - it's still hard to find all the callq's in the stream of assembly,
>    i think it should be highlighted in a minimal fashion.

I'll use a graphic '->', like  or something, have to look at the
libslang docs.
 
>  - the mixed assembly and source code output for annotation now 
>    became *harder* to follow, that the instruction opcodes are not 
>    embedded. The reason is that there's now fewer visual patterns 
>    that set apart the two types of lines.
> 
>    Not sure what to do about it, but it's not really usable this way, 
>    to me at least. Color differentiation would certainly help, if 
>    it's not too intrusive - could assembly be drawn grey? That would 
>    put it into the 'visual background' on most terminal color 
>    schemes.

I'll make that configurable so that we can play a bit with it and then
decide on some sane default.
 
>    I tried a few mockup screens of splitting the screen 
>    intelligently, and found one variant that works pretty well for 
>    me. The main UI design complication is that the assembly opcodes 
>    look so C source code-ish when put next to each other.
> 
>    So this is the original output:
> 
>          :        static u8 kallsyms2elf_type(char type)                                            â
>          :        {                                                                                 â
>          :                if (type == 'W')                                                          â
>     0.00 :          43fd18:       mov    %rdx,%rdi                                                  â
>          :                struct rb_node **p = &symbols->rb_node;                                   â
>          :                struct rb_node *parent = NULL;                                            â
>          :                const u64 ip = sym->start;                                                â
>          :                struct symbol *s;                                                         â
>          :                                                                                          â
>          :                while (*p != NULL) {                                                      â
>     0.00 :          43fd1b:       mov    (%rcx),%rdx                                                â
>     0.00 :          43fd1e:       test   %rdx,%rdx                                                  â
>     0.00 :          43fd21:       jne    43fd08 <map__process_kallsym_symbol+0xc8>                  â
> 
> 
>    and here's the mockup:
> 
>         .                              | static u8 kallsyms2elf_type(char type)                     â
>         .                              | {                                                          â
>         .                              |         if (type == 'W')                                   â
>    0.00 #  43fd18: mov    %rdx,%rdi                                                                 â
>         .                              |         struct rb_node **p = &symbols->rb_node;            â
>         .                              |         struct rb_node *parent = NULL;                     â
>         .                              |         const u64 ip = sym->start;                         â
>         .                              |         struct symbol *s;                                  â
>         .                              |                                                            â
>         .                              |         while (*p != NULL) {                               â
>    0.00 #  43fd1b: mov    (%rcx),%rdx                                                               â
>    0.00 #  43fd1e: test   %rdx,%rdx                                                                 â
>    0.00 #  43fd21: jne    43fd08 <map__process_kallsym_symbol+0xc8>                                 â
> 
> There's several UI tricks:
> 
>  - typical short opcodes (80% of assembly) will fit on the left side 
>    of the screen.

right
 
>  - lines can still be arbitrarily long and overlap, so it's not a 
>    true split screen - but the vertical helper line prefixing source 
>    code lines keeps the eye focused on whichever side one intends to 
>    concentrate on.

Ok, I'll play with that.

	
>  - the first column separator uses two types of characters, '.' and 
>    '#', to help the eye find the blocks of assembly.

>  - we could, in addition, print assembly in grey.
> 
>  - i cut one character from the percentage column - the maximum value 
>    is 100.00 so we don't need the original 7.2 format, 6.2 is enough.

OK, after the first there was some 8 spaces that came from how it was
done long ago.
 
> We could eventually further compress the assembly display later on, 
> but auto-labeling function-local labels (which are 99% of the jump 
> targets). This would compress such jumps:
> 
>    0.00 #  43fd21: jne    43fd08 <map__process_kallsym_symbol+0xc8>
> 
> into:
> 
>    0.00 #  43fd21: jne    43fd08 <L3>

Yeah, this is something definetely in the plans, together with jumping
to labels, etc.
 
> Thanks,
> 
> 	Ingo
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