linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 3/3] ring-buffer: make cpu buffer entries counter atomic

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Date:	Sat, 2 May 2009 00:10:23 +0200
From:	Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@...il.com>
To:	Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>
Cc:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] ring-buffer: make cpu buffer entries counter atomic

On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 10:28:13AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, 1 May 2009, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 01:50:47PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > > 
> > > * Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > From: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@...hat.com>
> > > > 
> > > > The entries counter in cpu buffer is not atomic. Although it only 
> > > > gets updated by a single CPU, interrupts may come in and update 
> > > > the counter too. This would cause missing entries to be added.
> > > 
> > > > -	unsigned long			entries;
> > > > +	atomic_t			entries;
> > > 
> > > Hm, that's not really good as atomics can be rather expensive and 
> > > this is the fastpath.
> > > 
> > > This is the upteenth time or so that the fact that we do not disable 
> > > irqs while generating trace entries bites us in one way or another. 
> > > IRQs can come in and confuse function trace output, etc. etc.
> > > 
> > > Please lets do what i suggested a long time ago: disable irqs _once_ 
> > > in any trace point and run atomically from that point on, and enable 
> > > them once, at the end.
> > > 
> > > The cost is very small and it turns into a win immediately by 
> > > elimination of a _single_ atomic instruction. (even on Nehalem they 
> > > cost 20 cycles. More on older CPUs.) We can drop the preempt-count 
> > > disable/enable as well and a lot of racy code as well. Please.
> > > 
> > > 	Ingo
> > 
> > 
> > I also suspect one other good effect on doing this.
> > 
> > As you know, between a lock_reserve and a discard, several interrupts
> > can trigger some traces. It means that if some rooms have already been
> > reserved, the discard will really create a discarded entry and we
> > can't reuse it.
> > 
> > For example in the case of filters with lock tracing, we rapidly run
> > into entries overriden, making the lock events tracing about useless
> > because we rapidly lose everything.
> 
> If you want, we can disable interrupts from the event tracer, not the ring 
> buffer.
> 
> We would have to go back to the original ring buffer code that passed in 
> flags.



Or may be just copy the entry on the stack and filter on it,
then only reserve if it is eligible.


 
> > 
> > At least that's an effect I observed. I'm not sure the discard is the
> > real cause but it seems to make sense.
> > 
> > That's a pity because believe me it is very useful to hunt a softlockup.
> > 
> > Of course it doesn't prevent from NMI tempest, but we already have
> > protections for that.
> 
> If we do not allow interrupts to be traced, we can not allow NMIs either. 
> If we do not let the ring buffer be re-entrant, then we will not be able 
> to trace any NMI (to be safe).
> 
> Going this route, there would be no need to make a lockless ring buffer 
> either.


Hm that's really not what we want, indeed :-)
Just forget about what I said.


> 
> -- Steve
> 

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