• Steven Rostedt's avatar
    ring-buffer: prevent infinite looping on time stamping · 4143c5cb
    Steven Rostedt authored
    Impact: removal of unnecessary looping
    
    The lockless part of the ring buffer allows for reentry into the code
    from interrupts. A timestamp is taken, a test is preformed and if it
    detects that an interrupt occurred that did tracing, it tries again.
    
    The problem arises if the timestamp code itself causes a trace.
    The detection will detect this and loop again. The difference between
    this and an interrupt doing tracing, is that this will fail every time,
    and cause an infinite loop.
    
    Currently, we test if the loop happens 1000 times, and if so, it will
    produce a warning and disable the ring buffer.
    
    The problem with this approach is that it makes it difficult to perform
    some types of tracing (tracing the timestamp code itself).
    
    Each trace entry has a delta timestamp from the previous entry.
    If a trace entry is reserved but and interrupt occurs and traces before
    the previous entry is commited, the delta timestamp for that entry will
    be zero. This actually makes sense in terms of tracing, because the
    interrupt entry happened before the preempted entry was commited, so
    one may consider the two happening at the same time. The order is
    still preserved in the buffer.
    
    With this idea, instead of trying to get a new timestamp if an interrupt
    made it in between the timestamp and the test, the entry could simply
    make the delta zero and continue. This will prevent interrupts or
    tracers in the timer code from causing the above loop.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
    4143c5cb
ring_buffer.c 49.6 KB