• Stephane Eranian's avatar
    tools api fs: Make xxx__mountpoint() more scalable · c6fddb28
    Stephane Eranian authored
    The xxx_mountpoint() interface provided by fs.c finds mount points for
    common pseudo filesystems. The first time xxx_mountpoint() is invoked,
    it scans the mount table (/proc/mounts) looking for a match. If found,
    it is cached. The price to scan /proc/mounts is paid once if the mount
    is found.
    
    When the mount point is not found, subsequent calls to xxx_mountpoint()
    scan /proc/mounts over and over again.  There is no caching.
    
    This causes a scaling issue in perf record with hugeltbfs__mountpoint().
    The function is called for each process found in
    synthesize__mmap_events().  If the machine has thousands of processes
    and if the /proc/mounts has many entries this could cause major overhead
    in perf record. We have observed multi-second slowdowns on some
    configurations.
    
    As an example on a laptop:
    
    Before:
    
      $ sudo umount /dev/hugepages
      $ strace -e trace=openat -o /tmp/tt perf record -a ls
      $ fgrep mounts /tmp/tt
      285
    
    After:
    
      $ sudo umount /dev/hugepages
      $ strace -e trace=openat -o /tmp/tt perf record -a ls
      $ fgrep mounts /tmp/tt
      1
    
    One could argue that the non-caching in case the moint point is not
    found is intentional. That way subsequent calls may discover a moint
    point if the sysadmin mounts the filesystem. But the same argument could
    be made against caching the mount point. It could be unmounted causing
    errors.  It all depends on the intent of the interface. This patch
    assumes it is expected to scan /proc/mounts once. The patch documents
    the caching behavior in the fs.h header file.
    
    An alternative would be to just fix perf record. But it would solve the
    problem with hugetlbs__mountpoint() but there could be similar issues
    (possibly down the line) with other xxx_mountpoint() calls in perf or
    other tools.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarStephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarIan Rogers <irogers@google.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarJiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
    Cc: Alexander Shishkin <alexander.shishkin@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Andrey Zhizhikin <andrey.z@gmail.com>
    Cc: Kan Liang <kan.liang@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Kefeng Wang <wangkefeng.wang@huawei.com>
    Cc: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
    Cc: Namhyung Kim <namhyung@kernel.org>
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
    Cc: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
    Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
    Link: http://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200402154357.107873-3-irogers@google.comSigned-off-by: default avatarIan Rogers <irogers@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
    c6fddb28
fs.h 1.76 KB