There are already two events for context switches, namely the tracepoint
sched:sched_switch and the software event context_switches.
Unfortunately neither are suitable for use by non-privileged users for
the purpose of synchronizing hardware trace data (e.g. Intel PT) to the
context switch.
Tracepoints are no good at all for non-privileged users because they
need either CAP_SYS_ADMIN or /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid <= -1.
On the other hand, kernel software events need either CAP_SYS_ADMIN or
/proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid <= 1.
Now many distributions do default perf_event_paranoid to 1 making
context_switches a contender, except it has another problem (which is
also shared with sched:sched_switch) which is that it happens before
perf schedules events out instead of after perf schedules events in.
Whereas a privileged user can see all the events anyway, a
non-privileged user only sees events for their own processes, in other
words they see when their process was scheduled out not when it was
scheduled in. That presents two problems to use the event:
1. the information comes too late, so tools have to look ahead in the
event stream to find out what the current state is
2. if they are unlucky tracing might have stopped before the
context-switches event is recorded.
This new PERF_RECORD_SWITCH event does not have those problems
and it also has a couple of other small advantages.
It is easier to use because it is an auxiliary event (like mmap, comm
and task events) which can be enabled by setting a single bit. It is
smaller than sched:sched_switch and easier to parse.
To make the event useful for privileged users also, if the
context is cpu-wide then the event record will be
PERF_RECORD_SWITCH_CPU_WIDE which is the same as
PERF_RECORD_SWITCH except it also provides the next or
previous pid/tid.
Signed-off-by: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Tested-by: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Mathieu Poirier <mathieu.poirier@linaro.org>
Cc: Pawel Moll <pawel.moll@arm.com>
Cc: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1437471846-26995-2-git-send-email-adrian.hunter@intel.com
Signed-off-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
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