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Date:   Wed, 19 May 2021 19:07:54 +0100
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
To:     Nicolas Saenz Julienne <nsaenzju@redhat.com>
Cc:     rostedt@goodmis.org, linux-doc@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, mingo@redhat.com, corbet@lwn.net,
        mtosatti@redhat.com
Subject: Re: [RFC] trace: Add option for polling ring buffers
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References: <20210519175755.670876-1-nsaenzju@redhat.com>
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On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 07:57:55PM +0200, Nicolas Saenz Julienne wrote:
> To minimize trace's effect on isolated CPUs. That is, CPUs were only a
> handful or a single, process are allowed to run. Introduce a new trace
> option: 'poll-rb'.

maybe this should take a parameter in ms (us?) saying how frequently
to poll?  it seems like a reasonable assumption that somebody running in
this kind of RT environment would be able to judge how often their
monitoring task needs to collect data.

> [1] The IPI, in this case, an irq_work, is needed since trace might run
> in NMI context. Which is not suitable for wake-ups.

could we also consider a try-wakeup which would not succeed if in NMI
context?  or are there situations where we only gather data in NMI
context, and so would never succeed in waking up?  if so, maybe
schedule the irq_work every 1000 failures to wake up.