ring-buffer: Have nested events still record running time stamp
Up until now, if an event is interrupted while it is recorded by an
interrupt, and that interrupt records events, the time of those events will
all be the same. This is because events only record the delta of the time
since the previous event (or beginning of a page), and to handle updating
the time keeping for that of nested events is extremely racy. After years of
thinking about this and several failed attempts, I finally have a solution
to solve this puzzle.
The problem is that you need to atomically calculate the delta and then
update the time stamp you made the delta from, as well as then record it
into the buffer, all this while at any time an interrupt can come in and
do the same thing. This is easy to solve with heavy weight atomics, but that
would be detrimental to the performance of the ring buffer. The current
state of affairs sacrificed the time deltas for nested events for
performance.
The reason for previous failed attempts at solving this puzzle was because I
was trying to completely avoid slow atomic operations like cmpxchg. I final
came to the conclusion to always avoid cmpxchg is not possible, which is why
those previous attempts always failed. But it is possible to pick one path
(the most common case) and avoid cmpxchg in that path, which is the "fast
path". The most common case is that an event will not be interrupted and
have other events added into it. An event can detect if it has
interrupted another event, and for these cases we can make it the slow
path and use the heavy operations like cmpxchg.
One more player was added to the game that made this possible, and that is
the "absolute timestamp" (by Tom Zanussi) that allows us to inject a full 59
bit time stamp. (Of course this breaks if a machine is running for more than
18 years without a reboot!).
There's barrier() placements around for being paranoid, even when they
are not needed because of other atomic functions near by. But those
should not hurt, as if they are not needed, they basically become a nop.
Note, this also makes the race window much smaller, which means there
are less slow paths to slow down the performance.
The basic idea is that there's two main paths taken.
1) Not being interrupted between time stamps and reserving buffer space.
In this case, the time stamps taken are true to the location in the
buffer.
2) Was interrupted by another path between taking time stamps and reserving
buffer space.
The objective is to know what the delta is from the last reserved location
in the buffer.
As it is possible to detect if an event is interrupting another event before
reserving data, space is added to the length to be reserved to inject a full
time stamp along with the event being reserved.
When an event is not interrupted, the write stamp is always the time of the
last event written to the buffer.
In path 1, there's two sub paths we care about:
a) The event did not interrupt another event.
b) The event interrupted another event.
In case a, as the write stamp was read and known to be correct, the delta
between the current time stamp and the write stamp is the delta between the
current event and the previously recorded event.
In case b, extra space was reserved to just put the full time stamp into the
buffer. Which is done, as stated, in this path the time stamp taken is known
to match the location in the buffer.
In path 2, there's also two sub paths we care about:
a) The event was not interrupted by another event since it reserved space
on the buffer and re-reading the write stamp.
b) The event was interrupted by another event.
In case a, the write stamp is that of the last event that interrupted this
event between taking the time stamps and reserving. As no event came in
after re-reading the write stamp, that event is known to be the time of the
event directly before this event and the delta can be the new time stamp and
the write stamp.
In case b, one or more events came in between reserving the event and
re-reading he write stamp. Since this event's buffer reservation is between
other events at this path, there's no way to know what the delta is. But
because an event interrupted this event after it started, its fine to just
give a zero delta, and take the same time stamp as the events that happened
within the event being recorded.
Here's the implementation of the design of this solution:
All this is per cpu, and only needs to worry about nested events (not
parallel events).
The players:
write_tail: The index in the buffer where new events can be written to.
It is incremented via local_add() to reserve space for a new event.
before_stamp: A time stamp set by all events before reserving space.
write_stamp: A time stamp updated by events after it has successfully
reserved space.
/* Save the current position of write */
[A] w = local_read(write_tail);
barrier();
/* Read both before and write stamps before touching anything */
before = local_read(before_stamp);
after = local_read(write_stamp);
barrier();
/*
* If before and after are the same, then this event is not
* interrupting a time update. If it is, then reserve space for adding
* a full time stamp (this can turn into a time extend which is
* just an extended time delta but fill up the extra space).
*/
if (after != before)
abs = true;
ts = clock();
/* Now update the before_stamp (everyone does this!) */
[B] local_set(before_stamp, ts);
/* Now reserve space on the buffer */
[C] write = local_add_return(len, write_tail);
/* Set tail to be were this event's data is */
tail = write - len;
if (w == tail) {
/* Nothing interrupted this between A and C */
[D] local_set(write_stamp, ts);
barrier();
[E] save_before = local_read(before_stamp);
if (!abs) {
/* This did not interrupt a time update */
delta = ts - after;
} else {
delta = ts; /* The full time stamp will be in use */
}
if (ts != save_before) {
/* slow path - Was interrupted between C and E */
/* The update to write_stamp could have overwritten the update to
* it by the interrupting event, but before and after should be
* the same for all completed top events */
after = local_read(write_stamp);
if (save_before > after)
local_cmpxchg(write_stamp, after, save_before);
}
} else {
/* slow path - Interrupted between A and C */
after = local_read(write_stamp);
temp_ts = clock();
barrier();
[F] if (write == local_read(write_tail) && after < temp_ts) {
/* This was not interrupted since C and F
* The last write_stamp is still valid for the previous event
* in the buffer. */
delta = temp_ts - after;
/* OK to keep this new time stamp */
ts = temp_ts;
} else {
/* Interrupted between C and F
* Well, there's no use to try to know what the time stamp
* is for the previous event. Just set delta to zero and
* be the same time as that event that interrupted us before
* the reservation of the buffer. */
delta = 0;
}
/* No need to use full timestamps here */
abs = 0;
}
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200625094454.732790f7@oasis.local.home
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200627010041.517736087@goodmis.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200629025258.957440797@goodmis.orgReviewed-by: 
Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: 
Steven Rostedt (VMware) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
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