• Mark Rutland's avatar
    perf stat: Avoid skew when reading events · 3df33eff
    Mark Rutland authored
    When we don't have a tracee (i.e. we're attaching to a task or CPU),
    counters can still be running after our workload finishes, and can still
    be running as we read their values. As we read events one-by-one, there
    can be arbitrary skew between values of events, even within a group.
    This means that ratios within an event group are not reliable.
    
    This skew can be seen if measuring a group of identical events, e.g:
    
      # perf stat -a -C0 -e '{cycles,cycles}' sleep 1
    
    To avoid this, we must stop groups from counting before we read the
    values of any constituent events. This patch adds and makes use of a new
    disable_counters() helper, which disables group leaders (and thus each
    group as a whole). This mirrors the use of enable_counters() for
    starting event groups in the absence of a tracee.
    
    Closing a group leader splits the group, and without a disabled group
    leader the newly split events will begin counting. Thus to ensure counts
    are reliable we must defer closing group leaders until all counts have
    been read. To do so this patch removes the event closing logic from the
    read_counters() helper, explicitly closes the events using
    perf_evlist__close(), which also aids legibility.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
    Cc: Alexander Shishkin <alexander.shishkin@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1470747869-3567-1-git-send-email-mark.rutland@arm.comSigned-off-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
    3df33eff
builtin-stat.c 63.1 KB