perf_counter: record time running and time enabled for each counter
Impact: new functionality Currently, if there are more counters enabled than can fit on the CPU, the kernel will multiplex the counters on to the hardware using round-robin scheduling. That isn't too bad for sampling counters, but for counting counters it means that the value read from a counter represents some unknown fraction of the true count of events that occurred while the counter was enabled. This remedies the situation by keeping track of how long each counter is enabled for, and how long it is actually on the cpu and counting events. These times are recorded in nanoseconds using the task clock for per-task counters and the cpu clock for per-cpu counters. These values can be supplied to userspace on a read from the counter. Userspace requests that they be supplied after the counter value by setting the PERF_FORMAT_TOTAL_TIME_ENABLED and/or PERF_FORMAT_TOTAL_TIME_RUNNING bits in the hw_event.read_format field when creating the counter. (There is no way to change the read format after the counter is created, though it would be possible to add some way to do that.) Using this information it is possible for userspace to scale the count it reads from the counter to get an estimate of the true count: true_count_estimate = count * total_time_enabled / total_time_running This also lets userspace detect the situation where the counter never got to go on the cpu: total_time_running == 0. This functionality has been requested by the PAPI developers, and will be generally needed for interpreting the count values from counting counters correctly. In the implementation, this keeps 5 time values (in nanoseconds) for each counter: total_time_enabled and total_time_running are used when the counter is in state OFF or ERROR and for reporting back to userspace. When the counter is in state INACTIVE or ACTIVE, it is the tstamp_enabled, tstamp_running and tstamp_stopped values that are relevant, and total_time_enabled and total_time_running are determined from them. (tstamp_stopped is only used in INACTIVE state.) The reason for doing it like this is that it means that only counters being enabled or disabled at sched-in and sched-out time need to be updated. There are no new loops that iterate over all counters to update total_time_enabled or total_time_running. This also keeps separate child_total_time_running and child_total_time_enabled fields that get added in when reporting the totals to userspace. They are separate fields so that they can be atomic. We don't want to use atomics for total_time_running, total_time_enabled etc., because then we would have to use atomic sequences to update them, which are slower than regular arithmetic and memory accesses. It is possible to measure total_time_running by adding a task_clock counter to each group of counters, and total_time_enabled can be measured approximately with a top-level task_clock counter (though inaccuracies will creep in if you need to disable and enable groups since it is not possible in general to disable/enable the top-level task_clock counter simultaneously with another group). However, that adds extra overhead - I measured around 15% increase in the context switch latency reported by lat_ctx (from lmbench) when a task_clock counter was added to each of 2 groups, and around 25% increase when a task_clock counter was added to each of 4 groups. (In both cases a top-level task-clock counter was also added.) In contrast, the code added in this commit gives better information with no overhead that I could measure (in fact in some cases I measured lower times with this code, but the differences were all less than one standard deviation). [ v2: address review comments by Andrew Morton. ] Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Orig-LKML-Reference: <18890.6578.728637.139402@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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