From: compudj Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 05:38:18 +0000 (+0000) Subject: userspace tracing lite X-Git-Tag: v0.12.20~1918 X-Git-Url: https://git.lttng.org./?a=commitdiff_plain;h=2297e3a814a794960cbdac58267b22d80664bde3;p=lttv.git userspace tracing lite git-svn-id: http://ltt.polymtl.ca/svn@1571 04897980-b3bd-0310-b5e0-8ef037075253 --- diff --git a/ltt/branches/poly/doc/developer/lttng-userspace-tracing-lite.txt b/ltt/branches/poly/doc/developer/lttng-userspace-tracing-lite.txt new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fe63f0d8 --- /dev/null +++ b/ltt/branches/poly/doc/developer/lttng-userspace-tracing-lite.txt @@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ + + +Mathieu Desnoyers + +March 2006 + +Here is a simpler, but slower, version of user space tracing design. + +It will be useful on architectures where doing a system call is mandatory, for +example when CPUs are lacking a 64 bits TSC : it must be worked around by doing +a system call to the the time or the synthetic MSB of the TSC (yes, disabling +preemption is at least required). + + +So the design is simple : + +Two system calls : + +One system call for event logging + + +ltt_trace_generic +args : +fac_id +event_id +data pointer +data size + +ltt_register_generic +args: +struct pointer (in) +fac_id pointer (out) + +#define NAME_MAX 4096 + +struct : +char name[NAME_MAX] +u32 num_events +u32 checksum +u32 alignment +u32 int_size +u32 long_size +u32 pointer_size +u32 size_t_size + + +If a facility is registered twice, the same handle is used. + For a facility to be the exact same, it must share _every_ element of the + struct (even type sizes). +Potential problem : If a facility is registered, it is never unregistered. + +Now.. not being able to free facilities when they are not used is not fun. So +how can we know every process that has registered a facility have finished using +it ? If we know that, we might do a cleanup when _all_ the traces are destroyed: +this is way better than a reboot. + +A solution might be to keep a reference count to the fac_id : it would be +incremented upon registration and decremented when a process exits. To do that, +a process must keep an array of fac ids it uses. 0 is unset. + +CONFIG option : + +CONFIG_LTT_USERSPACE_GENERIC + + + + + +