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Adrian Hunter authored
There are already two events for context switches, namely the tracepoint sched:sched_switch and the software event context_switches. Unfortunately neither are suitable for use by non-privileged users for the purpose of synchronizing hardware trace data (e.g. Intel PT) to the context switch. Tracepoints are no good at all for non-privileged users because they need either CAP_SYS_ADMIN or /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid <= -1. On the other hand, kernel software events need either CAP_SYS_ADMIN or /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid <= 1. Now many distributions do default perf_event_paranoid to 1 making context_switches a contender, except it has another problem (which is also shared with sched:sched_switch) which is that it happens before perf schedules events out instead of after perf schedules events in. Whereas a privileged user can see all the events anyway, a non-privileged user only sees events for their own processes, in other words they see when their process was scheduled out not when it was scheduled in. That presents two problems to use the event: 1. the information comes too late, so tools have to look ahead in the event stream to find out what the current state is 2. if they are unlucky tracing might have stopped before the context-switches event is recorded. This new PERF_RECORD_SWITCH event does not have those problems and it also has a couple of other small advantages. It is easier to use because it is an auxiliary event (like mmap, comm and task events) which can be enabled by setting a single bit. It is smaller than sched:sched_switch and easier to parse. To make the event useful for privileged users also, if the context is cpu-wide then the event record will be PERF_RECORD_SWITCH_CPU_WIDE which is the same as PERF_RECORD_SWITCH except it also provides the next or previous pid/tid. Signed-off-by:
Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com> Acked-by:
Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Tested-by:
Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com> Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com> Cc: Mathieu Poirier <mathieu.poirier@linaro.org> Cc: Pawel Moll <pawel.moll@arm.com> Cc: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com> Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1437471846-26995-2-git-send-email-adrian.hunter@intel.comSigned-off-by:
Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
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