• Steven Rostedt's avatar
    ring-buffer: Add place holder recording of dropped events · 66a8cb95
    Steven Rostedt authored
    Currently, when the ring buffer drops events, it does not record
    the fact that it did so. It does inform the writer that the event
    was dropped by returning a NULL event, but it does not put in any
    place holder where the event was dropped.
    
    This is not a trivial thing to add because the ring buffer mostly
    runs in overwrite (flight recorder) mode. That is, when the ring
    buffer is full, new data will overwrite old data.
    
    In a produce/consumer mode, where new data is simply dropped when
    the ring buffer is full, it is trivial to add the placeholder
    for dropped events. When there's more room to write new data, then
    a special event can be added to notify the reader about the dropped
    events.
    
    But in overwrite mode, any new write can overwrite events. A place
    holder can not be inserted into the ring buffer since there never
    may be room. A reader could also come in at anytime and miss the
    placeholder.
    
    Luckily, the way the ring buffer works, the read side can find out
    if events were lost or not, and how many events. Everytime a write
    takes place, if it overwrites the header page (the next read) it
    updates a "overrun" variable that keeps track of the number of
    lost events. When a reader swaps out a page from the ring buffer,
    it can record this number, perfom the swap, and then check to
    see if the number changed, and take the diff if it has, which would be
    the number of events dropped. This can be stored by the reader
    and returned to callers of the reader.
    
    Since the reader page swap will fail if the writer moved the head
    page since the time the reader page set up the swap, this gives room
    to record the overruns without worrying about races. If the reader
    sets up the pages, records the overrun, than performs the swap,
    if the swap succeeds, then the overrun variable has not been
    updated since the setup before the swap.
    
    For binary readers of the ring buffer, a flag is set in the header
    of each sub page (sub buffer) of the ring buffer. This flag is embedded
    in the size field of the data on the sub buffer, in the 31st bit (the size
    can be 32 or 64 bits depending on the architecture), but only 27
    bits needs to be used for the actual size (less actually).
    
    We could add a new field in the sub buffer header to also record the
    number of events dropped since the last read, but this will change the
    format of the binary ring buffer a bit too much. Perhaps this change can
    be made if the information on the number of events dropped is considered
    important enough.
    
    Note, the notification of dropped events is only used by consuming reads
    or peeking at the ring buffer. Iterating over the ring buffer does not
    keep this information because the necessary data is only available when
    a page swap is made, and the iterator does not swap out pages.
    
    Cc: Robert Richter <robert.richter@amd.com>
    Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
    Cc: Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com>
    Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
    Cc: "Luis Claudio R. Goncalves" <lclaudio@uudg.org>
    Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
    66a8cb95
trace_selftest.c 18.3 KB