Re: [PATCH v3 08/10] mm: frontswap: add tracing support

From: Sasha Levin
Date: Mon Jun 11 2012 - 06:37:58 EST


On Mon, 2012-06-11 at 11:33 +0300, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> On 06/10/2012 07:51 PM, Sasha Levin wrote:
> >> Add tracepoints to frontswap API.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Minchan Kim <minchan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Normally, adding new tracepoint isn't easy without special reason.
> > I'm not sure all of frontswap function tracing would be valuable.
> > Shsha, Why do you want to add tracing?
> > What's scenario you want to use tracing?

I added tracing when working on code to integrate KVM with
frontswap/cleancache and needed to see that the flow of code between
host side kvm and zcache and guest side cleancache, frontswap and kvm is
correct.

> Yup, the added tracepoints look more like function tracing. Shouldn't
> you use something like kprobes or ftrace/perf for this?

I'm not sure really, there are quite a few options provided by the
kernel...

I used tracepoints because I was working on code that integrates with
KVM, and saw that KVM was working with tracepoints in a very similar way
to what I needed, so I assumed tracepoints is the right choice for me.

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