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SubjectRe: perf events over (net) console?

* Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2010-09-09 at 14:31 +0200, Harald Gustafsson wrote:
>
> > Sorry for being daft...
>
> No worries, I'm sure we all qualify at times ;-)
>
> > >> >
> > >> > You need a process context anyway to read the data and send it to
> > >> > whatever place you want it.
> > >> >
> > >> > Putting that in-kernel serves no purpose what so ever.
> > >>
> > >> But if we bring the splice support, that can be done with minimal
> > >> userspace noise. Plus that would work with the usual sockets but not
> > >> limited to that.
> > >
> > > Yes. If we can transform the data over the network without it touching
> > > disk, then that would be a sufficiently 'does not disturb other tasks'
> > > measurement method.
> >
> > Thanks for the pointers to more information, and yes my thoughts was
> > more about avoiding the data copy then avoiding any processing
> > context at all.
>
> Right, currently you get a single copy with mmap() + write(), once we
> manage to fix splice() and actually provide perf-splice() you'd be
> able to do zero-copy.

I think it would also be very useful to have some sort of tooling help
for "low overhead/impact perf recording".

If there's a 'target box' and a different 'host box' (where most of
development is done, etc.), then there might not be any NFS connection
set up to make zero-copy file transfer easy. Doing it over ssh would add
overhead.

One possible workflow would be to run this on the target/remote box:

perf remote

And as long as that command is running there, it could be used from the
development box (over a trusted local network), using something like:

perf --remote <hostname> record sleep 60
perf --remote <hostname> stat -a sleep 1

these would all do the measurements on the remote box, and the resulting
perf.data would be created on the desktop box. Communication would be
done via some well-known port.

etc.

An alternative implementation would be to drive this on the assumption
that an ssh connection can be established with the target box - but
followup high-volume data transfer would be done over an ordinary TCP
connection.

I.e. the workflow would be even simpler, something like:

perf --remote user@hostname record sleep 60
perf --remote user@hostname stat -a sleep 1

Internally it would work by executing those commands on the remote box
via ssh, and redirecting the output via a TCP connection. (some other
details might be needed as well for splice to be usable in such a setup)

Would anyone be interested in having (and implementing ;-) this?

Ingo


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