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RE: precompiled probing scenarios
- From: "Stone, Joshua I" <joshua dot i dot stone at intel dot com>
- To: "David Smith" <dsmith at redhat dot com>, "Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche at elastic dot org>
- Cc: <systemtap at sources dot redhat dot com>
- Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:33:38 -0700
- Subject: RE: precompiled probing scenarios
On Thursday, October 19, 2006 12:50 PM, David Smith wrote:
> Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
>> kernel.function("*") should match exactly what was there before.
>> Probes on module("*").FOO would be redefined to mean something like
>> "all modules that we know at translation time that *might* exist,
>> that also happen to be *loaded* at run time. This aspect of wildcard
>> expansion would thus take place at run time rather than translate
>> time. It just so happens that the same module might probe a greater
>> or lesser number of modules on an actual system. With that proviso,
>> a script-source-level hash still seems to work.
>[...]
> The hash is computed using the following data:
>[...]
> - pass 2 script output
>[...]
> Stuff left to do:
>
> - Testing, testing, testing
> - Correct module handling (which Frank outlined above)
Actually, correct module handling should already be covered if you're
hashing the pass-2 output. Pass-2 is elaboration, which uses debuginfo
to locate the actual probe points. Suppose I run a script like this:
probe module("*").function("*interrupt*") { log(probefunc()) }
Pass-2 output will include all of the probe points matching my wildcard:
...
module("ahci").function("ahci_interrupt@drivers/scsi/ahci.c:889"),
module("libata").function("ata_interrupt@drivers/scsi/libata-core.c:4198
"),
...
If I then load a new module that also has a "*interrupt*" function, the
pass-2 output will include the new probe point, and will thus get a
different hash.
In my estimation, there are two lengthy tasks in script compilation:
pass-2 elaboration (digging through lots of debuginfo) and pass-4
C-compilation. This caching mechanism removes the pain of pass-4, which
is probably the worse of the two. But if you find a caching scheme to
also avoid pass-2, then the module handling will need to be considered.
Josh