linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH/RFC 1/2] perfcounters: provide a way to read the current value of interrupting counters

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Date:	Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:31:46 -0700
From:	Corey Ashford <cjashfor@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:	Paul Mackerras <paulus@...ba.org>
CC:	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>
Subject: Re: [PATCH/RFC 1/2] perfcounters: provide a way to read the current
 value of interrupting counters

Paul Mackerras wrote:
> Peter Zijlstra writes:
> 
>>> It was specifically requested by people porting PAPI to PCL, and it
>>> seems like a reasonable request.
>> OK, then why didn't the changelog say so :-)
> 
> Fair point. :)
> 
>> Could you ask them why though, if they need it I won't object too much,
>> but I'd like to know the use case.
> 
> PAPI has the concept of "overflowing" counters, apparently, which
> generate a signal every N counts, about which they said: "One thing to
> keep in mind, you should always be able to read a live counter,
> regardless of whether or not it's set to overflow..."
> 
> I assume the PAPI interface lets you do everything with overflowing
> counters that you can do with non-overflowing counters, and that's why
> they want it, but I don't know much about PAPI myself.
> 
>> As to the method proposed, I think Ingo and I talked about 'abusing'
>> non-blocking reads for this purpose, would that work? Then if you need
>> two fds you could dup() and flip one to non-blocking.
> 
> The non-blocking flag is one of the "file status" flags, which are
> shared between all fds pointing at the same struct file.  So if you
> dup() and set one to non-blocking, the other one becomes non-blocking
> too.  So that doesn't fly.
> 
>> The non-blocking read would either output whatever is already pending,
>> but in case there is no data, it would generate some on the spot.
> 
> The difficulty then is how userspace does know what it ended up
> getting?  It may not always be possible to distinguish based on the
> value you get.
> 
> The other idea I had was to use the file position, and say that
> positions greater than some threshold read the event queue, and less
> than the threshold read the counter value.  That way you can read the
> event queue with read() and the counter value with pread(..., 0).
> 
> The objection to that is that the threshold is a bit artificial, and
> would need to be different between interrupting and counting
> counters.  Also we may need to do strange things to file->f_pos like
> initializing it to the (non-zero) threshold when opening an
> interrupting counter.
> 

This could be a reason for getting rid of the purely interrupting 
counter record type.  That way, you always read at the [artificial] 
offset to read the event queue for counters with a non-zero irq_period, 
and always at offset zero to read the current counter value.

It would work similarly well for the other idea of creating a cloned fd. 
  The fd returned from the initial open is always used for reading the 
current value, and the cloned one is for reading the event queue.

Regards,

- Corey

Corey Ashford
Software Engineer
IBM Linux Technology Center, Linux Toolchain
Beaverton, OR
503-578-3507
cjashfor@...ibm.com

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