tracing: Add documentation of snapshot utility

This patch adds snapshot description in ftrace documentation.
This description includes what the snapshot is and how to use it.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20121226025309.3252.150.stgit@liselsia

Cc: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Signed-off-by: Hiraku Toyooka <hiraku.toyooka.gu@hitachi.com>
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
This commit is contained in:
Hiraku Toyooka 2012-12-26 11:53:09 +09:00 committed by Steven Rostedt
parent debdd57f51
commit c1043fcda1
1 changed files with 83 additions and 0 deletions

View File

@ -1842,6 +1842,89 @@ an error.
# cat buffer_size_kb
85
Snapshot
--------
CONFIG_TRACER_SNAPSHOT makes a generic snapshot feature
available to all non latency tracers. (Latency tracers which
record max latency, such as "irqsoff" or "wakeup", can't use
this feature, since those are already using the snapshot
mechanism internally.)
Snapshot preserves a current trace buffer at a particular point
in time without stopping tracing. Ftrace swaps the current
buffer with a spare buffer, and tracing continues in the new
current (=previous spare) buffer.
The following debugfs files in "tracing" are related to this
feature:
snapshot:
This is used to take a snapshot and to read the output
of the snapshot. Echo 1 into this file to allocate a
spare buffer and to take a snapshot (swap), then read
the snapshot from this file in the same format as
"trace" (described above in the section "The File
System"). Both reads snapshot and tracing are executable
in parallel. When the spare buffer is allocated, echoing
0 frees it, and echoing else (positive) values clear the
snapshot contents.
More details are shown in the table below.
status\input | 0 | 1 | else |
--------------+------------+------------+------------+
not allocated |(do nothing)| alloc+swap | EINVAL |
--------------+------------+------------+------------+
allocated | free | swap | clear |
--------------+------------+------------+------------+
Here is an example of using the snapshot feature.
# echo 1 > events/sched/enable
# echo 1 > snapshot
# cat snapshot
# tracer: nop
#
# entries-in-buffer/entries-written: 71/71 #P:8
#
# _-----=> irqs-off
# / _----=> need-resched
# | / _---=> hardirq/softirq
# || / _--=> preempt-depth
# ||| / delay
# TASK-PID CPU# |||| TIMESTAMP FUNCTION
# | | | |||| | |
<idle>-0 [005] d... 2440.603828: sched_switch: prev_comm=swapper/5 prev_pid=0 prev_prio=120 prev_state=R ==> next_comm=snapshot-test-2 next_pid=2242 next_prio=120
sleep-2242 [005] d... 2440.603846: sched_switch: prev_comm=snapshot-test-2 prev_pid=2242 prev_prio=120 prev_state=R ==> next_comm=kworker/5:1 next_pid=60 next_prio=120
[...]
<idle>-0 [002] d... 2440.707230: sched_switch: prev_comm=swapper/2 prev_pid=0 prev_prio=120 prev_state=R ==> next_comm=snapshot-test-2 next_pid=2229 next_prio=120
# cat trace
# tracer: nop
#
# entries-in-buffer/entries-written: 77/77 #P:8
#
# _-----=> irqs-off
# / _----=> need-resched
# | / _---=> hardirq/softirq
# || / _--=> preempt-depth
# ||| / delay
# TASK-PID CPU# |||| TIMESTAMP FUNCTION
# | | | |||| | |
<idle>-0 [007] d... 2440.707395: sched_switch: prev_comm=swapper/7 prev_pid=0 prev_prio=120 prev_state=R ==> next_comm=snapshot-test-2 next_pid=2243 next_prio=120
snapshot-test-2-2229 [002] d... 2440.707438: sched_switch: prev_comm=snapshot-test-2 prev_pid=2229 prev_prio=120 prev_state=S ==> next_comm=swapper/2 next_pid=0 next_prio=120
[...]
If you try to use this snapshot feature when current tracer is
one of the latency tracers, you will get the following results.
# echo wakeup > current_tracer
# echo 1 > snapshot
bash: echo: write error: Device or resource busy
# cat snapshot
cat: snapshot: Device or resource busy
-----------
More details can be found in the source code, in the