linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH V5 02/16] perf, core: introduce pmu context switch callback

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Message-ID: <20140929093657.GD5430@worktop>
Date:	Mon, 29 Sep 2014 11:36:57 +0200
From:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
To:	Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@...il.com>
Cc:	kan.liang@...el.com, eranian@...gle.com,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, mingo@...hat.com, paulus@...ba.org,
	acme@...nel.org, ak@...ux.intel.com,
	"Yan, Zheng" <zheng.z.yan@...el.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH V5 02/16] perf, core: introduce pmu context switch
 callback

On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 06:47:41PM +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:

Trim replies already -- I should really go write that auto-bounce for
excessive quoting already.

> I wonder if it's worth to create such an arch callback and core corner case.
> How about just scheduling out then in the events that have lbr, wouldn't we
> have more simple code in the end?

That depends a bit, the lbr save/restore is indeed very expensive (at
least 16 msr reads and 16 msr writes -- when assuming 16 deep lbr), but
this is still on about the same order of msr writes required to switch 4
counters (esp. if we include the PEBS msrs).

So at that point we still win about half the context switch cost by not
doing an unconditional sched out / sched in.

Also, there are more consumers of this thing.

> Besides, BTS would benefit from that too. I can't seem to find where it is
> flushed when a task context switches inside a same perf context. It seems
> that it doesn't happen, BTS traces are flushed only on event stop (and overflow IRQ)
> and events aren't stopped if a context switch happens in the same perf context.
> Having Y task bts traces from task X event is probably not what we want.

Flushing the BTS is indeed a good point, but that would definitely
benefit from this, draining the BTS buffer is likely faster than doing
all those MSR writes.
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