Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] latencytop lock usage improvement

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Tue Apr 30 2019 - 05:10:43 EST


On Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 04:35:05PM +0800, Feng Tang wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> On Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 10:09:10AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 04:03:28PM +0800, Feng Tang wrote:
> > > Hi All,
> > >
> > > latencytop is a very nice tool for tracing system latency hotspots, and
> > > we heavily use it in our LKP test suites.
> >
> > What data does latency-top give that perf cannot give you? Ideally we'd
> > remove latencytop entirely.
>
> Thanks for the review. In 0day/LKP test service, we have many tools for
> monitoring and analyzing the test results, perf is the most important
> one, which has the most parts in our auto-generated comparing results.
> For example to identify spinlock contentions and system hotspots.
>
> latencytop is another tool we used to find why systems go idle, like why
> workload chose to sleep or waiting for something.

You're not answering the question; why can't you use perf for that? ISTR
we explicitly added support for things like that.