On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 03:36:08PM +0300, Alexander Shishkin wrote: > For counters such as instruction tracing, it is useful for the decoder > to know which tasks are running when the event is first scheduled in, > before the first sched_switch. > > To single out such instruction tracing pmus, this patch alse introduces > ITRACE PMU capability. You forgot to tell why. Also explain why. The next context switch event will also tell you the previous task. So this seems like superfluous information. Also if you really want this you could simply emit an empty AUX record I suppose, no need to create yet another record type.