Re: [PATCH 00/11] [GIT PULL] more updates for the tag format

[Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 11:47:51AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 09:03:18AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 12:03:03PM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > > Yes, another approach for handling this case would be to take my
> > > "jbd2_dev_to_name" function and support it as a first-class tagged
> > > type; after all, I'm sure ext4 won't be the only place that would like
> > > to take a dev_t and print the device name.  So this could certainly be
> > > fixed by adding some kind of "<dev:xxx>" sort of tagged name.
> > 
> > We should absolutely agree on one way to represent block device for
> > tracers.  At this point xfs, gfs2 and the block tracer all use
> > major/minor.  I agree that having a name would be nicer for text output,
> > but I really want to keep the dev_t for the binary output.  We should
> > also make sure we agree on a field name so that filtering will work
> > the same for all block-related tracers (especially important if we want
> > to trace something from the filesystem down to the block layer).
> 
> And I want to keep the dev_t as what stored in the ring buffer for
> space reasons; but the text name is far more convient in terms of
> being human-readable, *especially* given there are some crazy people
> out there wanting to make major/minor numbers be completely random.
> The problem with that is that a log trace file might not be useful
> after a reboot, unless someone had enough foresight to save the device
> mappings which were in effect at the that the trace was taken.
> 
> So if we store the dev_t in the ring buffer, and have a way of
> translating the dev_t into a human-friendly name at printk happen, I
> think that meets both of our goals.  That would imply that filtering
> would be using a device number, which would certainly be more
> efficient than doing a string compare.
> 
> 					- Ted


For the filters, we could enter the text name which would be
internally converted into a dev_t, there should be no problem.

Also the raw dev_t can be stored and then human-friendly printed on
print time.

Both seem about trivial to add.
 
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