The irqsoff and friends tracers help in finding causes of latency in the
kernel. The also work with the function tracer to show what was happening
when interrupts or preemption are disabled. But the function tracer has
a bit of an overhead and can cause exagerated readings.
Currently, when tracing with /proc/sys/kernel/ftrace_enabled = 0, where the
function tracer is disabled, the information that is provided can end up
being useless. For example, a 2 and a half millisecond latency only showed:
# tracer: preemptirqsoff
#
# preemptirqsoff latency trace v1.1.5 on 2.6.32
# --------------------------------------------------------------------
# latency: 2463 us, #4/4, CPU#2 | (M:preempt VP:0, KP:0, SP:0 HP:0 #P:4)
# -----------------
# | task: -4242 (uid:0 nice:0 policy:0 rt_prio:0)
# -----------------
# => started at: _spin_lock_irqsave
# => ended at: remove_wait_queue
#
#
# _------=> CPU#
# / _-----=> irqs-off
# | / _----=> need-resched
# || / _---=> hardirq/softirq
# ||| / _--=> preempt-depth
# |||| /_--=> lock-depth
# |||||/ delay
# cmd pid |||||| time | caller
# \ / |||||| \ | /
hackbenc-4242 2d.... 0us!: trace_hardirqs_off <-_spin_lock_irqsave
hackbenc-4242 2...1. 2463us+: _spin_unlock_irqrestore <-remove_wait_queue
hackbenc-4242 2...1. 2466us : trace_preempt_on <-remove_wait_queue
The above lets us know that hackbench with pid 2463 grabbed a spin lock
somewhere and enabled preemption at remove_wait_queue. This helps a little
but where this actually happened is not informative.
This patch adds the stack dump to the end of the irqsoff tracer. This provides
the following output:
hackbenc-4242 2d.... 0us!: trace_hardirqs_off <-_spin_lock_irqsave
hackbenc-4242 2...1. 2463us+: _spin_unlock_irqrestore <-remove_wait_queue
hackbenc-4242 2...1. 2466us : trace_preempt_on <-remove_wait_queue
hackbenc-4242 2...1. 2467us : <stack trace>
=> sub_preempt_count
=> _spin_unlock_irqrestore
=> remove_wait_queue
=> free_poll_entry
=> poll_freewait
=> do_sys_poll
=> sys_poll
=> system_call_fastpath
Now we see that the culprit of this latency was the free_poll_entry code.
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
cc51a0fca6