Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S934386Ab0KPMQ3 (ORCPT ); Tue, 16 Nov 2010 07:16:29 -0500 Received: from mtagate4.uk.ibm.com ([194.196.100.164]:34243 "EHLO mtagate4.uk.ibm.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S934325Ab0KPMQ0 (ORCPT ); Tue, 16 Nov 2010 07:16:26 -0500 Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH v2 1/7] taskstats: Add new taskstats command TASKSTATS_CMD_ATTR_PIDS From: Michael Holzheu Reply-To: holzheu@linux.vnet.ibm.com To: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Shailabh Nagar , Andrew Morton , Venkatesh Pallipadi , Suresh Siddha , Ingo Molnar , Oleg Nesterov , John stultz , Thomas Gleixner , Balbir Singh , Martin Schwidefsky , Heiko Carstens , Roland McGrath , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-s390@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: <1289841705.2109.513.camel@laptop> References: <20101111170352.732381138@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <20101111170813.527389224@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <1289676005.2109.148.camel@laptop> <1289836380.1916.41.camel@holzheu-laptop> <1289837178.2109.504.camel@laptop> <1289840968.1916.85.camel@holzheu-laptop> <1289841705.2109.513.camel@laptop> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Organization: IBM Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:16:19 +0100 Message-ID: <1289909779.1940.26.camel@holzheu-laptop> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.28.3 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2260 Lines: 58 Hello Peter, On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 18:21 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 18:09 +0100, Michael Holzheu wrote: > > > > That you should not use sched_clock(), > > > > What should we use instead? > > Depends on what you want, look at kernel/sched_clock.c > > > > What does last departed mean? That is what timeline are you counting in? > > > Do you want time as tasks see it, or time as your wallclock sees it? > > > > "last_depart" should be the time stamp, where the task has left a CPU > > the last time. > > > > We assume that we can compare "last_depart" with "time_ns" in the > > taskstats structure, > > I think you assume I actually know anything about taskstat :-), its the > thing I always say =n to in my config file and have so far happily > ignored all code of. > > > if we use task_rq(t)->clock for last_depart and > > sched_clock() for stats->time_ns. > > Then you're up shit creek because rq->clock doesn't necessarily have any > correlation to sched_clock(). > > > We also assume that we get wallclock > > intervals in nanoseconds, if we look at two sched_clock() timestamps. > > Invalid assumption. Ok, thanks. So sched_clock() seems to be a bad idea for our purposes. An alternative approach could be to have a global counter for the task snapshots, which is increased each time a snapshot is created for userspace. In addition to that we had to add a snapshot counter field to the task_struct that is set to the current value of the global counter each time a task leaves a CPU. Then userspace could ask for all tasks that have been active after snapshot number x. In the response userspace gets all tasks that have a snapshot number bigger than x together with the new snapshot number y that can be used for the next query. Still it would be useful to add a timestamp of the creation of the taskstats data in the response to userspace for calculating the interval time between two snapshots. Would the usage of ktime_get() be valid for that purpose? Michael -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/