On Fri, 9 Oct 2020, Axel Rasmussen wrote: > The goal of these tracepoints is to be able to debug lock contention > issues. This lock is acquired on most (all?) mmap / munmap / page fault > operations, so a multi-threaded process which does a lot of these can > experience significant contention. > > We trace just before we start acquisition, when the acquisition returns > (whether it succeeded or not), and when the lock is released (or > downgraded). The events are broken out by lock type (read / write). > > The events are also broken out by memcg path. For container-based > workloads, users often think of several processes in a memcg as a single > logical "task", so collecting statistics at this level is useful. > > The end goal is to get latency information. This isn't directly included > in the trace events. Instead, users are expected to compute the time > between "start locking" and "acquire returned", using e.g. synthetic > events or BPF. The benefit we get from this is simpler code. > > Because we use tracepoint_enabled() to decide whether or not to trace, > this patch has effectively no overhead unless tracepoints are enabled at > runtime. If tracepoints are enabled, there is a performance impact, but > how much depends on exactly what e.g. the BPF program does. > > Signed-off-by: Axel Rasmussen <axelrasmussen@xxxxxxxxxx> Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx>
