Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 4/6] trace: Add per-vCPU tracing states for events with the 'vcpu' property

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 14/06/2016 10:39, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 06:39:46PM +0200, Lluís Vilanova wrote:
>> Paolo Bonzini writes:
>>
>>> On 13/06/2016 14:15, Lluís Vilanova wrote:
>>>>> That said, I am skeptical about the benefit of the interfaces you are
>>>>> adding.  They add a lot of complication and overhead (especially
>>>>> regarding the memory/cache overhead of the dstate array) without a clear
>>>>> use case, in my opinion; all the processing you do at run-time is just
>>>>> as well suited for later filtering.
>>>>
>>>> This should make tracing faster on the future with multi-threaded TCG, as 
>>>> well
>>>> as trace files much smaller if you're tracing something like memory
>>>> accesses. Also, bear in mind this series was split from a much larger one 
>>>> for
>>>> simplicity. The follow-up one provides much larger performance benefits by
>>>> avoiding the generation of TCG code to call the tracing backend when a 
>>>> vCPU is
>>>> not traced.
>>
>>> This still assumes that tracing only some VCPUs is a common use case.
>>> Is it?...
>>
>> I use it for code profiling by sampling across vCPUs, or only on vCPUs I know
>> run processes of my interest. The profiles can then be used for analyzing the
>> application/system behaviour.
>>
>> Also, with the fast-path checks already in place 
>> ('trace_events_enabled_count'),
>> performance when not tracing should never be worse with this series.
>>
>> If this feature does not look useful to overall QEMU I will fold it into my
>> other out-of-tree patches.
> 
> I think the per-vcpu tracing feature is reasonable for qemu.git as long
> as it does not introduce performance regressions for existing users.

I'm okay with it if the dstate array is changed to uint16_t.

Thanks,

Paolo