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  • Steven Rostedt's avatar
    ftrace: restructure tracing start/stop infrastructure · 9036990d
    Steven Rostedt authored
    
    
    Impact: change where tracing is started up and stopped
    
    Currently, when a new tracer is selected via echo'ing a tracer name into
    the current_tracer file, the startup is only done if tracing_enabled is
    set to one. If tracing_enabled is changed to zero (by echo'ing 0 into
    the tracing_enabled file) a full shutdown is performed.
    
    The full startup and shutdown of a tracer can be expensive and the
    user can lose out traces when echo'ing in 0 to the tracing_enabled file,
    because the process takes too long. There can also be places that
    the user would like to start and stop the tracer several times and
    doing the full startup and shutdown of a tracer might be too expensive.
    
    This patch performs the full startup and shutdown when a tracer is
    selected. It also adds a way to do a quick start or stop of a tracer.
    The quick version is just a flag that prevents the tracing from
    taking place, but the overhead of the code is still there.
    
    For example, the startup of a tracer may enable tracepoints, or enable
    the function tracer.  The stop and start will just set a flag to
    have the tracer ignore the calls when the tracepoint or function trace
    is called.  The overhead of the tracer may still be present when
    the tracer is stopped, but no tracing will occur. Setting the tracer
    to the 'nop' tracer (or any other tracer) will perform the shutdown
    of the tracer which will disable the tracepoint or disable the
    function tracer.
    
    The tracing_enabled file will simply start or stop tracing.
    
    This change is all internal. The end result for the user should be the same
    as before. If tracing_enabled is not set, no trace will happen.
    If tracing_enabled is set, then the trace will happen. The tracing_enabled
    variable is static between tracers. Enabling  tracing_enabled and
    going to another tracer will keep tracing_enabled enabled. Same
    is true with disabling tracing_enabled.
    
    This patch will now provide a fast start/stop method to the users
    for enabling or disabling tracing.
    
    Note: There were two methods to the struct tracer that were never
     used: The methods start and stop. These were to be used as a hook
     to the reading of the trace output, but ended up not being
     necessary. These two methods are now used to enable the start
     and stop of each tracer, in case the tracer needs to do more than
     just not write into the buffer. For example, the irqsoff tracer
     must stop recording max latencies when tracing is stopped.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    9036990d