Re: [PATCH 3/4] trace: add ability to collect call chain of non-current task.

[Andrew Vagin <avagin@gmail.com>]

On 09/28/2011 12:55 AM, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 04:05:51PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>> On Mon, 2011-09-26 at 19:55 +0400, Andrew Vagin wrote:
>>> Know issues:
>>> * Now call chains for non-current tasks are collected on x86 only,
>>>    but it may be done for other architectures simply.
>>> * It collects only kernel call chains, because we can't get direct
>>>    access to memory of other processes and this operation should be
>>>    fast enough.
>> Also, it changes the semantics of tracepoint, normally you return the
>> callchain leading to the tracepoint, this changes that.
>>
>>
>> I'm not entirely against it, as I can see the use, but I would like to
>> solicit other opinions.
> There is also a problem in perf tools because we are dealing with a
> callchain that doesn't belong to the current thread memory mapping and symbol
> space. I believe that's a problem once we deal with the userspace part of
> the callchain.
>
> That and the fact there are other ways to get that callchain like taking
> the one of the last sched_switch event from the waked thread.
>
> Perhaps we should use the sched_switch event and a post_sched_switch
> event, compute the time difference as a weight and use the callchain of any of
> those. Perhaps as a plugin in perf report?
>
> In any case that rather sounds like something that should be done in post-processing
> in userspace, in perf tools.
>
> We should probably avoid the remote callchains, sounds like asking for complications
> everywhere.
Thank you for comments and suggestions. I take timeout to think over them.