Commit 4b147936 authored by Tom Zanussi's avatar Tom Zanussi Committed by Steven Rostedt (VMware)

tracing: Add support for 'synthetic' events

Synthetic events are user-defined events generated from hist trigger
variables saved from one or more other events.

To define a synthetic event, the user writes a simple specification
consisting of the name of the new event along with one or more
variables and their type(s), to the tracing/synthetic_events file.

For instance, the following creates a new event named 'wakeup_latency'
with 3 fields: lat, pid, and prio:

    # echo 'wakeup_latency u64 lat; pid_t pid; int prio' >> \
      /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/synthetic_events

Reading the tracing/synthetic_events file lists all the
currently-defined synthetic events, in this case the event we defined
above:

    # cat /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/synthetic_events
    wakeup_latency u64 lat; pid_t pid; int prio

At this point, the synthetic event is ready to use, and a histogram
can be defined using it:

    # echo 'hist:keys=pid,prio,lat.log2:sort=pid,lat' >> \
    /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events/synthetic/wakeup_latency/trigger

The new event is created under the tracing/events/synthetic/ directory
and looks and behaves just like any other event:

    # ls /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events/synthetic/wakeup_latency
      enable  filter  format  hist  id  trigger

Although a histogram can be defined for it, nothing will happen until
an action tracing that event via the trace_synth() function occurs.
The trace_synth() function is very similar to all the other trace_*
invocations spread throughout the kernel, except in this case the
trace_ function and its corresponding tracepoint isn't statically
generated but defined by the user at run-time.

How this can be automatically hooked up via a hist trigger 'action' is
discussed in a subsequent patch.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/c68df2284b7d172669daf9be29db62ad49bbc559.1516069914.git.tom.zanussi@linux.intel.comSigned-off-by: default avatarTom Zanussi <tom.zanussi@linux.intel.com>
[fix noderef.cocci warnings, sizeof pointer for kcalloc of event->fields]
Signed-off-by: default avatarFengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt (VMware) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
parent 0212e2aa
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