Re: [PATCH 3/4] x86: Add trace point for MSR accesses

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Tue,  1 Dec 2015 17:00:59 -0800
Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org> wrote:

> From: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
> 
> For debugging low level code interacting with the CPU
> it is often useful to trace the MSR read/writes. This gives
> a concise summary of PMU and other operations.
> 
> perf has an ad-hoc way to do this using trace_printk,
> but it's somewhat limited (and also now spews ugly boot
> messages when enabled)
> 
> Instead define real trace points for all MSR accesses.
> 
> This adds three new trace points: read_msr and write_msr
> and rdpmc.
> 
> They also report if the access faulted (if *_safe is used)
> 
> This allows filtering and triggering on specific
> MSR values, which allows various more advanced
> debugging techniques.
> 
> All the values are well defined in the CPU documentation.
> 
> The trace can be post processed with
> Documentation/trace/postprocess/decode_msr.py
> to add symbolic MSR names to the trace.
> 
> I only added it to native MSR accesses in C, not paravirtualized
> or in entry*.S (which is not too interesting)
> 
> Originally the patch kit moved the MSRs out of line.
> This uses an alternative approach recommended by Steven Rostedt
> of only moving the trace calls out of line, but open coding the
> access to the jump label.
> 
> v2:
> Move MSR trace events to arch/x86/include/asm/msr-trace.h
> Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
>

For the general tracing part.

Acked-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>

-- Steve