From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754902Ab0CLClK (ORCPT ); Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:41:10 -0500 Received: from ozlabs.org ([203.10.76.45]:54179 "EHLO ozlabs.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752767Ab0CLClI (ORCPT ); Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:41:08 -0500 Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:41:00 +1100 From: Paul Mackerras To: Ingo Molnar Cc: Corey Ashford , LKML , Peter Zijlstra , Frederic Weisbecker , Steven Rostedt Subject: Re: [RFC] [PATCH 1/1] perf: add support for arch-dependent symbolic event names to "perf stat" Message-ID: <20100312024100.GA2734@brick.ozlabs.ibm.com> References: <4B8F1B58.5000702@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <4B8FFE55.5070008@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <20100311124608.GG31354@elte.hu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20100311124608.GG31354@elte.hu> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 01:46:08PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > * Corey Ashford wrote: > > > On 3/3/2010 6:30 PM, Corey Ashford wrote: > > >For your review, this patch adds support for arch-dependent symbolic > > >event names to the "perf stat" tool, and could be expanded to other > > >"perf *" commands fairly easily, I suspect. > I'm quite much against stop-gap measures like this - they tend to become > tomorrow's impossible-to-remove quirk. > > If you want extensible events you can already do it by providing an ftrace > tracepoint event via TRACE_EVENT. They are easy to add and ad-hoc, and are > supported throughout by perf. If I've understood correctly what Corey is doing, I think you're missing the point. The idea, I thought, was to provide a way to be able to use symbolic names for raw hardware events rather than just numbers. I don't see how ftrace tracepoint events are relevant to that. Now as to whether an external .so is the best way to provide the processor-specific mapping of names to raw events, I'm not sure. If the kernel can provide that mapping via procfs, sysfs or eventfs, that would be an alternative, but it does mean the kernel has those tables in unswappable memory (and potentially the tables for all the processors that the kernel supports), which seems unnecessary. Or they can just be added to the perf source code. Paul.