While thinking on the whole clock discussion it occurred to me we have
two distinct uses of time:

 1) the tracking of event/ctx/cgroup enabled/running/stopped times
    which includes the self-monitoring support in struct
    perf_event_mmap_page.

 2) the actual timestamps visible in the data records.

And we've been conflating them.

The first is all about tracking time deltas, nobody should really care
in what time base that happens, its all relative information, as long
as its internally consistent it works.

The second however is what people are worried about when having to
merge their data with external sources. And here we have the
discussion on MONOTONIC vs MONOTONIC_RAW etc..

Where MONOTONIC is good for correlating between machines (static
offset), MONOTNIC_RAW is required for correlating against a fixed rate
hardware clock.

This means configurability; now 1) makes that hard because it needs to
be internally consistent across groups of unrelated events; which is
why we had to have a global perf_clock().

However, for 2) it doesn't really matter, perf itself doesn't care
what it writes into the buffer.

The below patch makes the distinction between these two cases by
adding perf_event_clock() which is used for the second case. It
further makes this configurable on a per-event basis, but adds a few
sanity checks such that we cannot combine events with different clocks
in confusing ways.

And since we then have per-event configurability we might as well
retain the 'legacy' behaviour as a default.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: David Ahern <dsahern@gmail.com>
Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
Cc: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>