Application of instrument in the kernel
William Cohen
wcohen@redhat.com
Wed Feb 23 04:00:00 GMT 2005
I am working on a paper that provides a couple examples on how to
instrument kernel code with kprobes. I asked for some suggestions on
things that would be interesting to instrument.
I ended up instrumenting the generic_make_request function that is used
by the block io devices.
Some of the other suggestion I got:
-Measure the latency to handle do hardware-interrupt processing. This is
the reason that I did measured the cost of kprobe and jprobe to
determine how much overhead this would add.
-Time to do a context switch in the kerne/sched.c:schedule(). In this
case there are specific places in the function where things happen and
having markers for those points might be useful.
-Instrument the mm/memory.c:handle_mm_fault() to find out which virtual
addresses are causing the page faults. Could look at the return value of
the function to determine whether it was a minor or major page fault.
One of the kernel engineers pointed me to this archived email:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-netdev&m=110902672620626&w=2
The referenced pdf document
(http://developer.osdl.org/shemminger/bic-beta-patch.pdf) has a refernce
to some probes kprobes written to track down the problem:
http://develop er.osdl.org/shemminger/tcpprobe.tar.gz
It uses jprobes to track down the problem.
-Will
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