linux-kernel - KPROBES: Instrumenting a function's call site

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Message-Id: <1190758358.30061.13.camel@rockstar.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu>
Date:	Tue, 25 Sep 2007 18:12:38 -0400
From:	Avishay Traeger <atraeger@...sunysb.edu>
To:	prasanna@...ibm.com, ananth@...ibm.com,
	anil.s.keshavamurthy@...el.com, davem@...emloft.net
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: KPROBES: Instrumenting a function's call site

Hello,
I am trying to use kprobes to measure the latency of a function by
instrumenting its call site.  Basically, I find the call instruction,
and insert a kprobe with a pre-handler and post-handler at that point.
The pre-handler measures the latency (reads the TSC counter).  The
post-handler measures the latency again, and subtracts the value that
was read in the pre-handler to compute the total latency of the called
function.

So to measure the latency of foo(), I basically want kprobes to do this:
pre_handler();
foo();
post_handler();

The problem is that the latencies that I am getting are consistently low
(~10,000 cycles).  When I manually instrument the functions, the latency
is about 20,000,000 cycles.  Clearly something is not right here.

Is this a known issue?  Instead of using the post-handler, I can try to
add a kprobe to the following instruction with a pre-handler.  I was
just curious if there was something fundamentally wrong with the
approach I took, or maybe a bug that you should be made aware of.

Please CC me on any replies (not subscribed to LKML).

Thanks,
Avishay

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