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From:   Ze Gao <zegao2021@gmail.com>
Date:   Mon, 31 Jul 2023 18:17:12 +0800
Message-ID: <CAD8CoPABfCBmGvg5WnJQ6+=wmz7dNTY=ubd9nahVvzDOvo9t2g@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v2 1/3] sched, tracing: add to report task state in
 symbolic chars
To:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc:     Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>,
        Namhyung Kim <namhyung@kernel.org>,
        Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>,
        Alexander Shishkin <alexander.shishkin@linux.intel.com>,
        Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@kernel.org>,
        Ian Rogers <irogers@google.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>, Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>,
        Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>,
        Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-perf-users@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-trace-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-trace-devel@vger.kernel.org, Ze Gao <zegao@tencent.com>
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On Mon, Jul 31, 2023 at 5:37=E2=80=AFPM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.or=
g> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 26, 2023 at 08:16:16PM +0800, Ze Gao wrote:
> > Internal representations of task state are likely to be changed or
> > ordered, and reporting them to userspace without exporting them as
> > part of API is not a good choice, which can easily break a userspace
> > observability tool as kernel evolves. For example, perf suffers from
> > this and still reports wrong states by this patch.
> >
> > OTOH, some masqueraded state like TASK_REPORT_IDLE and TASK_REPORT_MAX
> > are also reported inadvertently, which confuses things even more.
> >
> > So add a new variable in company with the old raw value to report task
> > state in symbolic char, which is self-explaining and no further
> > translation is needed, and also report priorities in 'short' to save
> > some buffer space.  Of course this does not break any userspace tool.
> >
> > Note for PREEMPT_ACTIVE, we introduce 'p' to report it and use the old
> > conventions for the rest.
>
> So I really dont much like this. This looses the ability to see the
> actual wait state flags, there could be multiple. Eg, things like
> TASK_FREEZEABLE gets lost completely.

How about adding a new char for each distinct state you want to report
, e.g., 'F' for this for debug purposes ? I don;t think we can lose the
multiple flags just because we choose to report in chars. Still people
can use the old raw value since we do not replace but supplement it here.

Regards,
Ze