On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 07:08:53PM +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> [also adding Steven, he's the tracing expert after all :-)]
>
> Hi Xenia, Sarah, all,
>
> > (Mentors and wireless folks, we're struggling a bit with adding trace
> > events to the xHCI USB host controller driver. I'm trying to look at
> > the ath6kl driver trace events as an example. We could use some help
> > and/or advice.)
>
> Those were in turn modelled on mac80211, cfg80211 and/or iwlwifi, I
> think; might be worth also looking there. In general though, it's all
> pretty similar.
>
> > > lets say that we want the tracepoint function to have the prototype:
> > >
> > > void trace_cmd_address_device(const char *fmt, ...).
>
> I'm not sure this is possible. I think we (wireless) do this with
>
> void trace_cmd_address_device(struct va_format *vaf)
>
> instead only.
>
> Note that there's no easy way to dynamically allocate the right amount
> of space in the ringbuffer, or at least I haven't found one. We
> therefore have a static size, which is somewhat inefficient.
Yes, that does look inefficient. Would it make sense to add a couple
different trace event classes for different sized buffers, and call
those trace classes conditionally, based on the size of the formatted
string? Or would that be too much of a mess.
Either way, it's only inefficient when trace events are turned on. We
don't expect xHCI debugging to be enabled by users very often. I do
expect that there will be a lot of debugging when it gets turned on.
Can userspace increase the size of the ring buffer? How much space do
we have by default?
> > The ath driver defines a new trace event class, ath6kl_log_event.
> > Various types of tracepoints, like trace_ath6kl_log_warn, use that event
> > class. Wrappers like ath6kl_warn() call those trace points, passing it
> > a struct va_format on the stack:
> >
> > int ath6kl_warn(const char *fmt, ...)
> > {
> > struct va_format vaf = {
> > .fmt = fmt,
> > };
> > va_list args;
> > int ret;
> >
> > va_start(args, fmt);
> > vaf.va = &args;
> > ret = ath6kl_printk(KERN_WARNING, "%pV", &vaf);
>
> Note also on older kernels you used to have to do va_copy() here because
> "%pV" didn't do it by itself. Guess you don't care though, but I
> sometimes have to worry about backporting :-)
The trace events are unlikely to get backported, so I'm not concerned
about that.
> > int xhci_debug_address(const char *fmt, ...)
>
> This confuses me somewhat -- why is it called "xhci_debug_address()"
> when it takes arbitrary parameters? Where's the "address" part?
It's debugging the xHCI Address command output. Depending on the status
of the command, we print different statement in the xHCI code. E.g. we
print when the command times out, or finishes with an error status
because there was a USB transfer error on the bus.
We can work on better names later. :)
> > DEFINE_EVENT(xhci_log_event, xhci_dbg_address,
> > TP_PROTO(struct va_format *vaf),
> > TP_ARGS(vaf)
> > );
> >
> > DECLARE_EVENT_CLASS(xhci_log_event,
> > TP_PROTO(struct va_format *vaf),
> > TP_ARGS(vaf),
> > TP_STRUCT__entry(
> > __dynamic_array(char, msg, ATH6KL_MSG_MAX)
>
> Should probably not be ATH6KL_MSG_MAX :-)
Yes.
> And this is what I talked about before -- it always allocates the max in
> the ringbuffer even for really short messages.
Noted.
> > And then code in xhci_address_device() in drivers/usb/host/xhci.c can do
> > things like:
> >
> > xhci_debug_address(xhci, "Bad Slot ID %d\n", udev->slot_id);
>
> Otherwise this looks about right (you have an xhci argument you didn't
> declare above, but this is obviously pseudo-code only)
>
> > And we can define similar trace event classes for the various xHCI
> > commands or ring debugging, so that we can enable or disable trace
> > points individually for different parts of the xHCI driver.
>
> I think it'd be worth (also) doing more specific tracepoints instead
> though.
>
> I don't really know what xhci does, but I suppose it has register
> read/write, maybe packet (urb?) submissions etc. so something like the
> iwlwifi_io system in drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/iwl-devtrace.h might
> (also) be (more) useful. In iwlwifi I have tracing for
> * IO accesses & interrupt notifications/reasons
> * commands and TX packets submitted to the device
> * notifications/RX packets received from the device
> * previously existing debug messages
My initial list of specific trace points was something like:
1. xHCI host initialization and shutdown
2. xHCI memory allocation (dynamic ring resizing, structure alloc, etc)
3. A few individual xHCI host controller command tracepoints:
* status only for all completed commands
* Address Device command status and output
* Configure Endpoint and Evaluate Context output
* individual trace points for other xHCI commands
4. Tracepoints for all USB transfer types:
* Control TX output (only for non-successful transfers)
* Bulk TX
* Interrupt TX
* Isoc TX
5. URB cancellation
And probably more. Basically, I want to be able to control what gets
printed, based on where I think the xHCI bug might be. Does that sound
reasonable?
> The message tracing was really more of an after-thought in iwlwifi (and
> ath6kl as well I guess) because we already had a lot of debug messages
> and capturing it all together can be useful.
>
> However, tracing all the debug messages is actually fairly expensive, I
> think in part because of the string formatting and in part because of
> the always-max allocations in the ringbuffer.
So are there parts of the driver that don't have the debug messages go
through the trace events code, in order to not fill up the ring buffer?
> > I'm actually wondering if the call to ath6kl_printk is somehow necessary
> > in order to be able to pass arguments on the stack.
>
> I don't think it is, but formatting the messages *only* for tracing
> seems a bit odd?
Why is it odd?
Sarah Sharp
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