Re: [PULL] hardware latency detector

From: Jon Masters
Date: Thu Jun 18 2009 - 21:33:05 EST


On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 18:25 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Thu, 18 Jun 2009, Jon Masters wrote:
> >
> > Please pull "hwlat", the hardware latency detector for 2.6.31.
>
> I really want to know more before I pull.

Ok.

> Has this been in -next?

No, it hasn't. But it has been tested quite extensively by a number of
people and is currently in the -rt tree.

> Discussed on lkml?

Yes. I posted an RFC patch back when it was called the SMI detector,
then a patch last week with the new generic name of hardware latency
detector (at Ingo's suggestion of renaming).

> How does it work?

It started as an SMI detector. Basically, when this module is loaded and
enabled, it will grab all CPUs in periodic calls to stop_machine and sit
in a configurable loop, looking for unexplainable latencies. Doing it
this way allows us to look for something stealing the CPU from Linux
without the kernel knowing - we report the statistics via debugfs.

Hope that helps! Thanks Linus!

Jon.


--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/