Date:   Wed, 9 Mar 2022 12:30:54 +0000
From:   Carsten Haitzler <carsten.haitzler@...s.arm.com>
To:     James Clark <james.clark@....com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Cc:     coresight@...ts.linaro.org, linux-perf-users@...r.kernel.org,
        acme@...nel.org, mike.leach@...aro.org,
        suzuki K Poulose <suzuki.poulose@....com>,
        Leo Yan <leo.yan@...aro.org>,
        Mathieu Poirier <mathieu.poirier@...aro.org>,
        Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@....com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 12/12] perf test: Add docs for coresight and related tests

I have an updated patch set queued to send out, so responding now. I've 
addressed various things. See below.

On 1/19/22 16:43, James Clark wrote:
> 
> 
> On 15/12/2021 16:04, carsten.haitzler@...s.arm.com wrote:
>> From: Carsten Haitzler <carsten.haitzler@....com>
>>
>> This adds documentation about the coresight specific tests as part of
>> perf test
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Carsten Haitzler <carsten.haitzler@....com>
> 
> I will use this commit to comment on the set as a whole. The other comments about
> specific issues I have left inline.
> 
> I ran the tests twice on N1SDP (kernel version perf/core 48ffaedf017ad) and had two
> different sets of failures, indicating some flakyness, which is one reason to not have
> tests with magic numbers as Leo has raised. Are you able to give a complete list of
> where you have run these so far? I know we can't check everywhere, but at least all
> of Arm's own reference platforms should be passing.
> 
> First run:
>    
>     92: Coresight / Thread Loop 25 Threads                              : FAILED!
>     94: Coresight / Thread Loop 10 Threads - Check TID                  : FAILED!
>     95: Coresight / Thread Loop 2 Threads - Check TID                   : FAILED!
>     96: Coresight / Thread Loop 250 Threads - Check TID                 : FAILED!
>     97: Coresight / Unroll Loop Thread 1                                : FAILED!
>     99: Coresight / Unroll Loop Thread 2                                : FAILED!
>   
> Second run:
> 
>    92: Coresight / Thread Loop 25 Threads                              : FAILED!
>    94: Coresight / Thread Loop 10 Threads - Check TID                  : FAILED!
>    95: Coresight / Thread Loop 2 Threads - Check TID                   : FAILED!
>    96: Coresight / Thread Loop 250 Threads - Check TID                 : FAILED!
>    97: Coresight / Unroll Loop Thread 1                                : FAILED!

Yes. There is actual problems at the data production end of the 
pipeline. Let me just focus on one of the type of examples. The Check 
TID examples look for some thread data for each thread that runs in the 
sample. If they do not get at least one such context id that matches a 
thread ID (as that is what the contextid does map to) then it will fail. 
  We're missing that. It's not reliable. The tests show this. They don't 
fix it, but the point of these tests is to find issues so we know what 
issues exist before any data is decoded.

> I have pasted the verbose output of two of these at the very end.
> 
> The major problem I have with the tests is the time that they take to run. Now
> a full test run takes 31m+ on N1SDP, where previously it took 1m 9s. There are
> quite a few reasons why this isn't a good idea. It will take extra cycles on
> anyone's CI and that means it will now take longer for anyone to make any changes
> if they run the tests, slowing down all Perf work from now onward. Even if you
> want to run just the Coresight tests, it doesn't really help as that is 90% of
> the time taken, so personally for me I'm not likely to run them while working on
> Coresight changes. The longer the tests take the more likely it is that they are
> skipped, reducing the benefits of the tests. Also if anyone has timeouts set on > CI these are likely going to have to be adjusted now.

In my new patch set I've removed a lot of the tests and kept only a 
smaller set. In my tests it now takes about 3-8 mins to run instead of 
about 1 min (It's variable because the amount of data collected can be 
highly variable and 99% of the time in these tests is spend dumping the 
perf data to see what is in there and this is time consuming. If the 
test produces 2x the data vs last run it takes a lot longer to dump and 
this actually happens).

> Is it possible to get the run time of each test down to 5-10 seconds? This will
> make it much nicer for us to work with going forwards.

Unfortunately I can't get it down to that. As above. The TID tests are 
fairly short but sometimes produce 20m perf data files, sometimes 80m 
sometimes 130m... it's indeterminate even if the actual test itself is 
constant (runs the same identical workload). I can cut down the number 
of tests and squeeze down the loop runs etc. which I have now done, but 
we still have the above problem.

> I'd also have liked to have had a discussion on the mailing list about what the test
> methodology should be in general before starting. For example for this patch set it
> looks like the coverage is quite wide because of the number of tests and time it
> takes to run, but actually they all use "cs_etm//u -- <process>" as the run command.
> This only tests per-process userspace mode resulting in very narrow coverage.
> And there is no mention in a cover letter about how this expands on or interacts
> with the existing test_arm_coresight.sh test which I don't think can be ignored.
> For example it iterates over sinks. Could that same iteration not be applied to
> these tests? They seem to exist in isolation and it's not clear which one we should
> be adding to going forwards.

It's a more "extensible harness" to just drop many varieties of tests 
into - e.g. the TID example s- do we collect thread data from every 
thread? They also store "quality" of data over time in CSV files. You 
can clearly see the high variability coming out of the tests there. They 
include actual test tools/source (don't just run some existing binary 
like touch) thus control what is being recorded. I built them to be 
easily expanded over time with more specific case tests by just dropping 
in a new directory with a new tool and.or a new script in the tests dir 
to use that tool or an existing one and re-use shared functions etc.

And yes - it tests only userspace (for now). Rome was not built in a 
day. It's testing userspace as that is what is being controlled (by the 
test tools). Tracing kernel code is another problem and thing to test. I 
was hoping this is a start and that's why it's built as a more extensive 
harness to be re-used and expanded on.

> I'd like to see a much more exploration of the different modes and flags to justify
> such a high run time:
>    
>    * per-CPU
>    * per-thread
>    * with and without timestamps
>    * strobing

All future problems to solve.

> If this is supposed to be just an initial implementation covering one case, then
> by the "test one thing" ethos, there should only be one test case. Each case
> should be testing one thing with minimal overlapping. But it looks like tests like

Different workloads. Provide something that should have a large amount 
of instructions to trace across lots of memory as opposed to small tight 
loops. What do we collect then? Do we collect data across multiple 
threads? If we keep every core busy, then what? Due to the way data is 
collected (buffers/interrupts), it's a lossy exercise and Having 
different workloads to see where we might not collect as much data as 
we'd like is useful. That's why there are multiple tests.

> "Thread loop 10" and "thread loop 250" just test the same thing, and I don't see
> the value in maintaining that. Also "bubblesort" and "memcpy" don't have comments
> explaining why running on those two different test programs actually makes a
> difference. Obviously this comment is partially related to the run time, if it was
> shorter perhaps it would be less important how many variations we ran.

Those were existing tests being used in test_etm (out of kernel tree) 
already so I put them in as they were seemingly good enough there so 
perf test would become a superset of the above and add more.

The runtime is almost entirely due to perf dump. I spent a little time 
profiling perf dump and didn't see any obvious hotspots to quickly pick 
low hanging fruit from.

> It's also not clear what failure modes the tests are looking for. There are
> comments like "We should almost always see F3 atoms", but it's not clear how
> F3 atoms are a signal of a high quality trace. And there are numbers like:
>    
>    perf_dump_aux_verify "$DATA" 66 6 6
>    perf_dump_aux_verify "$DATA" 4188 1630 1630

Think of it measuring the body - seeing some amount as opposed to none 
or only 1 ... yes- this is measuring the compressed encoding but it's 
one of the very common ones so it was a quick way to do this as opposed 
to completely decoding the data and then checking that (which would be 
more costly and make tests take longer). I did have high-ish numbers but 
they were actually a result of going "well on most runs we tend to get X 
in real life so if we get X/10 we should have enough". Yes - 1 or 2 or 
10 could also be sensible as it is lossy and we should collect SOME 
data, but preferably we should be collecting more. If we would not have 
a lossy process that collected everything we should get a stable amount 
of data collected... that would be the goal eventually.

> but there are no comments to say how 66 or 4188 were judged to be "high quality" vs
> any other number. This means that anyone encountering a failure is just going to
> change the number until it passes, undoing any value that the test added. If the tests
> are looking for complete loss of data, then > 1 or > 2 would be sufficient. But if
> someone makes a mistake in the driver to produce less data, then these tests aren't
> going to catch that anyway, since there is a chance that it falls within the allowed
> thresholds.

That's actually the point. Imagine someone makes a change in the driver 
that now loses 60% of the trace data. If we just assume any amount of 
loss is just fine - we'd never know unless we have tests measuring this 
until eventually some time later someone wonders why their profile data 
is so variable... this is exactly why the tests store the data they 
collect over time in csv files so you can see trends or points where 
suddenly data took a hit or jumped up to collect more.

> In my opinion a much better measure of quality would be to look at the coverage of
> fully decoded trace, for example if you have 10 functions called from a loop across
> multiple DSOs, do each of those functions show up in synthesised instruction samples.

That would be more expensive to do (and make the tests take longer) 
which goes against some of your desires above. This would be another 
stage in the tests beyond what they do (Rome was not built in a day :)). 
Coverage would then tell us if we cover the function at least once. How 
many times do we cover it? If it runs 10000 times do we get trace data 
for all of its 10000 executions? or only 100 of them? or 10? or 1? This 
is certainly much more involved and an evolution of tests to do more. 
I'm not sure I should sit and make the test do everything possible and 
test everything from day 1. Start with a base that is intended to expand 
cleanly and in a "modular" way and then build from there. I've learned 
over the years to always build things in steps and get your groundwork 
good before going the next step. I'm doing this here. Groundwork with 
some exercising of it.

> Which brings me to my next point, the tests only seem to look at the raw trace, rather
> than the synthesised samples. To me this seems like it's validating what comes out of
> the CPU more than looking at what the driver or userspace Perf are doing. I think this

100% correct. Or more looking at what comes out of the kernel perf 
driver into perf data files. It's focusing on this part of the pipeline 
- not the "decode that data and do something useful with it" part. I 
specifically focused on this part as this is a source of data loss and 
quality of data. You can have the best decoding on the planet - if your 
input data is poor ... you will have poor results. I also understood 
that you were working on the other end of the pipeline (the decode/do 
something with it end) and thus thought I'd fill in the part you were 
not working on rather than conflict with the stuff you are doing.

> isn't the right place for these tests to live and would be better suited to run on bare
> metal. This is because a user isn't going to be interested in how many F3 atoms there are,
> that's just an implementation detail. What's much more valuable is what samples are
> synthesised. We're also skipping most of the code in Perf by only looking at the raw
> trace, which makes it harder to justify putting the tests in the Perf code base.

Then then we would have our tests fragmented. Testing kernel output 
won't have tests in the kernel tree for the data/subsystem that is 
reading/collecting/writinf that data...

> In short I think it would be much better if we had the following:
> 
>   * Much shorter run time

Done. Patches coming.

>   * Run each test program only once (for example it doesn't add value to run memcpy with different sizes)

Done mostly as above (except the TID test where I'm down to 2 tests).

>   * Only one test for each thing/failure mode

Done - mostly, as above.

>   * Much less overlapping test code (for example F3 atoms only need to be counted for one test, not all of them)

It's measuring if we have test "body". I could do this in more expensive 
ways in addition to the metadata blocks (async and trace info).

>   * Concrete descriptions of failure modes and what each test is looking for

I haven't done this yet - let me send a new patch set which is smaller 
and we'll go from there.

>   * Small magic numbers which are easy to justify (like "samples < 1, check for complete loss of data")

Done.

>   * Run through the full Perf pipeline and look at the synthesised samples rather than raw trace

I thought you were dealing with this end?

>   * Some thought about how this fits in with test_arm_coresight.sh

As above - more of an extended harness to add to over time rather than a 
single test that fails or succeeds - its broken down into many tests so 
you know which succeed or fail. I've dealt with tests units that merge 
dozens or even 100+ tests into a single case and then just report fail 
or succeed and it's very annoying as you don't get an isolated result to 
tell you what you broke. If this single shell script keeps getting more 
and more things to test then .. which one broke when all you see is a 
single fail? It's a time sink to go digging every time. Broken cleanly 
into multiple tests is far better.

> Thanks
> James
> 
> 
> 
> Test failure outputs:
> ---
> 
>    94: Coresight / Thread Loop 10 Threads - Check TID                  :
> --- start ---
> test child forked, pid 5821
> Couldn't synthesize bpf events.
> [ perf record: Woken up 1 times to write data ]
> [ perf record: Captured and wrote 128.106 MB ./perf-thread_loop-check-tid-10th.data ]
> 
> 
> 
> Warning:
> AUX data lost 1 times out of 1!
> 
> Thread IDs            not found in perf AUX data
> test child finished with -1
> ---- end ----
> Coresight / Thread Loop 10 Threads - Check TID: FAILED!
> 
> ========================================================
> 
> 
>   92: Coresight / Thread Loop 25 Threads                              :
> --- start ---
> test child forked, pid 5871
> Couldn't synthesize bpf events.
> [ perf record: Woken up 1 times to write data ]
> [ perf record: Captured and wrote 28.849 MB ./perf-thread_loop-25th.data ]
> Sanity check number of ATOM_F3 is too low (92062 < 388121)
> test child finished with -1
> ---- end ----
> Coresight / Thread Loop 25 Threads: FAILED!
> 
> 
>> ---
>>   MAINTAINERS                                |   1 +
>>   tools/perf/Documentation/arm-coresight.txt | 140 +++++++++++++++++++++
>>   2 files changed, 141 insertions(+)
>>   create mode 100644 tools/perf/Documentation/arm-coresight.txt
>>
>> diff --git a/MAINTAINERS b/MAINTAINERS
>> index d46e8469c467..1a93977a0132 100644
>> --- a/MAINTAINERS
>> +++ b/MAINTAINERS
>> @@ -1890,6 +1890,7 @@ F:	Documentation/trace/coresight/*
>>   F:	drivers/hwtracing/coresight/*
>>   F:	include/dt-bindings/arm/coresight-cti-dt.h
>>   F:	include/linux/coresight*
>> +F:	tools/perf/Documentation/arm-coresight.txt
>>   F:	tools/perf/arch/arm/util/auxtrace.c
>>   F:	tools/perf/arch/arm/util/cs-etm.c
>>   F:	tools/perf/arch/arm/util/cs-etm.h
>> diff --git a/tools/perf/Documentation/arm-coresight.txt b/tools/perf/Documentation/arm-coresight.txt
>> new file mode 100644
>> index 000000000000..3a9e6c573c58
>> --- /dev/null
>> +++ b/tools/perf/Documentation/arm-coresight.txt
>> @@ -0,0 +1,140 @@
>> +Arm Coresight Support
>> +=====================
>> +
>> +Coresight is a feature of some Arm based processors that allows for
>> +debugging. One of the things it can do is trace every instruction
>> +executed and remotely expose that information in a hardware compressed
>> +stream. Perf is able to locally access that stream and store it to the
>> +output perf data files. This stream can then be later decoded to give the
>> +instructions that were traced for debugging or profiling purposes. You
>> +can log such data with a perf record command like:
>> +
>> +    perf record -e cs_etm//u testbinary
>> +
>> +This would run some test binary (testbinary) until it exits and record
>> +a perf.data trace file. That file would have AUX sections if coresight
>> +is working correctly. You can dump the content of this file as
>> +readable text with a command like:
>> +
>> +    perf report --stdio --dump -i perf.data
>> +
>> +You should find some sections of this file have AUX data blocks like:
>> +
>> +    0x1e78 [0x30]: PERF_RECORD_AUXTRACE size: 0x11dd0  offset: 0  ref: 0x1b614fc1061b0ad1  idx: 0  tid: 531230  cpu: -1
>> +
>> +    . ... CoreSight ETM Trace data: size 73168 bytes
>> +            Idx:0; ID:10;   I_ASYNC : Alignment Synchronisation.
>> +              Idx:12; ID:10;  I_TRACE_INFO : Trace Info.; INFO=0x0 { CC.0 }
>> +              Idx:17; ID:10;  I_ADDR_L_64IS0 : Address, Long, 64 bit, IS0.; Addr=0x0000000000000000;
>> +              Idx:26; ID:10;  I_TRACE_ON : Trace On.
>> +              Idx:27; ID:10;  I_ADDR_CTXT_L_64IS0 : Address & Context, Long, 64 bit, IS0.; Addr=0x0000FFFFB6069140; Ctxt: AArch64,EL0, NS;
>> +              Idx:38; ID:10;  I_ATOM_F6 : Atom format 6.; EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
>> +              Idx:39; ID:10;  I_ATOM_F6 : Atom format 6.; EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
>> +              Idx:40; ID:10;  I_ATOM_F6 : Atom format 6.; EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
>> +              Idx:41; ID:10;  I_ATOM_F6 : Atom format 6.; EEEEEEEEEEEN
>> +              ...
>> +
>> +If you see these above, then your system is tracing coresight data
>> +correctly.
>> +
>> +To compile perf with coresight support in the perf directory do
>> +
>> +    make CORESIGHT=1
>> +
>> +This will compile the perf tool with coresight support as well as
>> +build some small test binaries for perf test. This requires you also
>> +be compiling for 64bit Arm (ARM64/aarch64). The tools run as part of
>> +perf coresight tracing are in tests/shell/tools/coresight.
>> +
>> +You will also want coresight support enabled in your kernel config.
>> +Ensure it is enabled with:
>> +
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT=y
>> +
>> +There are various other coresight options you probably also want
>> +enabled like:
>> +
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT_LINKS_AND_SINKS=y
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT_LINK_AND_SINK_TMC=y
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT_CATU=y
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT_SINK_TPIU=y
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT_SINK_ETBV10=y
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT_SOURCE_ETM4X=y
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT_STM=y
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT_CPU_DEBUG=y
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT_CTI=y
>> +    CONFIG_CORESIGHT_CTI_INTEGRATION_REGS=y
>> +
>> +Please refer to the kernel configuration help for more information.
>> +
>> +Perf test - Verify kernel and userspace perf coresight work
>> +===========================================================
>> +
>> +When you run perf test, it will do a lot of self tests. Some of those
>> +tests will cover Coresight (only if enabled and on ARM64). You
>> +generally would run perf test from the tools/perf directory in the
>> +kernel tree. Some tests will check some internal perf support like:
>> +
>> +    Check Arm CoreSight trace data recording and synthesized samples
>> +
>> +Some others will actually use perf record and some test binaries that
>> +are in tests/shell/tools/coresight and will collect traces to ensure a
>> +minimum level of functionality is met. The scripts that launch these
>> +tests are in tests/shell. These will all look like:
>> +
>> +    Coresight / Memcpy 1M 25 Threads
>> +    Coresight / Unroll Loop Thread 2
>> +    ...
>> +
>> +These perf record tests will not run if the tool binaries do not exist
>> +in tests/shell/tools/coresight/*/ and will be skipped. If you do not
>> +have coresight support in hardware then either do not build perf with
>> +coresight support or remove these binaries in order to not have these
>> +tests fail and have them skip instead.
>> +
>> +These tests will log historical results in the current working
>> +directory (e.g. tools/perf) and will be named stats-*.csv like:
>> +
>> +    stats-asm_pure_loop-out.csv
>> +    stats-bubble_sort-random.csv
>> +    ...
>> +
>> +These statistic files log some aspects of the AUX data sections in
>> +the perf data output counting some numbers of certain encodings (a
>> +good way to know that it's working in a very simple way). One problem
>> +with coresight is that given a large enough amount of data needing to
>> +be logged, some of it can be lost due to the processor not waking up
>> +in time to read out all the data from buffers etc.. You will notice
>> +that the amount of data collected can vary a lot per run of perf test.
>> +If you wish to see how this changes over time, simply run perf test
>> +multiple times and all these csv files will have more and more data
>> +appended to it that you can later examine, graph and otherwise use to
>> +figure out if things have become worse or better.
>> +
>> +Be aware that amny of these tests take quite a while to run, specifically
>> +in processing the perf data file and dumping contents to then examine what
>> +is inside.
>> +
>> +You can change where these csv logs are stored by setting the
>> +PERF_TEST_CORESIGHT_STATDIR environment variable before running perf
>> +test like:
>> +
>> +    export PERF_TEST_CORESIGHT_STATDIR=/var/tmp
>> +    perf test
>> +
>> +They will also store resulting perf output data in the current
>> +directory for later inspection like:
>> +
>> +    perf-memcpy-1m.data
>> +    perf-thread_loop-2th.data
>> +    ...
>> +
>> +You can alter where the perf data files are stored by setting the
>> +PERF_TEST_CORESIGHT_DATADIR environment variable such as:
>> +
>> +    PERF_TEST_CORESIGHT_DATADIR=/var/tmp
>> +    perf test
>> +
>> +You may wish to set these above environment variables if you which to
>> +keep the output of tests outside of the current working directory for
>> +longer term storage and examination.
>>

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