From: Steven Rostedt Due to a userspace issue with PowerTop v1, which hardcoded the offset of event fields that it was using, it broke when we removed the Big Kernel Lock counter from the event header. (commit e6e1e2593 "tracing: Remove lock_depth from event entry") Because this broke userspace, it was determined that we must keep those 4 bytes around. (commit a3a4a5acd "Regression: partial revert "tracing: Remove lock_depth from event entry"") This unfortunately wastes space in the ring buffer. 4 bytes per event, where a lot of events are just 24 bytes. That's 16% of the buffer wasted. A million events will add 4 megs of white space into the buffer. It was later noticed that PowerTop v1 could not work on systems where the kernel was 64 bit but the userspace was 32 bits. The reason was because the offsets are different between the two and the hard coded offset of one would not work with the other. With PowerTop v2, it implemented the same interface that both perf and trace-cmd use. That is, it reads the format file of the event to find the offsets of the fields it needs. This fixes the problem with running powertop on a 32 bit userspace running on a 64 bit kernel. It also no longer requires the 4 byte padding. As PowerTop v2 has been out for a while, and is included in all major distributions, it is time that we can safely remove the 4 bytes of padding. Users of PowerTop v1 should upgrade to PowerTop v2. Cc: Arjan van de Ven Cc: Linus Torvalds Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt --- include/linux/ftrace_event.h | 1 - kernel/trace/trace.c | 1 - kernel/trace/trace_events.c | 1 - 3 files changed, 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/include/linux/ftrace_event.h b/include/linux/ftrace_event.h index 43ef8b6..6f8d0b7 100644 --- a/include/linux/ftrace_event.h +++ b/include/linux/ftrace_event.h @@ -49,7 +49,6 @@ struct trace_entry { unsigned char flags; unsigned char preempt_count; int pid; - int padding; }; #define FTRACE_MAX_EVENT \ diff --git a/kernel/trace/trace.c b/kernel/trace/trace.c index d62248d..a387bd2 100644 --- a/kernel/trace/trace.c +++ b/kernel/trace/trace.c @@ -1173,7 +1173,6 @@ tracing_generic_entry_update(struct trace_entry *entry, unsigned long flags, entry->preempt_count = pc & 0xff; entry->pid = (tsk) ? tsk->pid : 0; - entry->padding = 0; entry->flags = #ifdef CONFIG_TRACE_IRQFLAGS_SUPPORT (irqs_disabled_flags(flags) ? TRACE_FLAG_IRQS_OFF : 0) | diff --git a/kernel/trace/trace_events.c b/kernel/trace/trace_events.c index 880073d..57e9b28 100644 --- a/kernel/trace/trace_events.c +++ b/kernel/trace/trace_events.c @@ -116,7 +116,6 @@ static int trace_define_common_fields(void) __common_field(unsigned char, flags); __common_field(unsigned char, preempt_count); __common_field(int, pid); - __common_field(int, padding); return ret; } -- 1.7.10.4 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/