• Stephane Eranian's avatar
    perf: Use hrtimers for event multiplexing · 9e630205
    Stephane Eranian authored
    The current scheme of using the timer tick was fine for per-thread
    events. However, it was causing bias issues in system-wide mode
    (including for uncore PMUs). Event groups would not get their fair
    share of runtime on the PMU. With tickless kernels, if a core is idle
    there is no timer tick, and thus no event rotation (multiplexing).
    However, there are events (especially uncore events) which do count
    even though cores are asleep.
    
    This patch changes the timer source for multiplexing.  It introduces a
    per-PMU per-cpu hrtimer. The advantage is that even when a core goes
    idle, it will come back to service the hrtimer, thus multiplexing on
    system-wide events works much better.
    
    The per-PMU implementation (suggested by PeterZ) enables adjusting the
    multiplexing interval per PMU. The preferred interval is stashed into
    the struct pmu. If not set, it will be forced to the default interval
    value.
    
    In order to minimize the impact of the hrtimer, it is turned on and
    off on demand. When the PMU on a CPU is overcommited, the hrtimer is
    activated.  It is stopped when the PMU is not overcommitted.
    
    In order for this to work properly, we had to change the order of
    initialization in start_kernel() such that hrtimer_init() is run
    before perf_event_init().
    
    The default interval in milliseconds is set to a timer tick just like
    with the old code. We will provide a sysctl to tune this in another
    patch.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarStephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
    Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
    Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1364991694-5876-2-git-send-email-eranian@google.comSigned-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
    9e630205
main.c 21.8 KB