instrumentation and kprobes really still "EXPERIMENTAL"?

Abhishek Sagar sagar.abhishek@gmail.com
Mon Jul 2 11:48:00 GMT 2007


On 7/2/07, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@mindspring.com> wrote:
> consider this random Kconfig file arch/x86_64/oprofile/Kconfig:
>
> =============================
> config PROFILING
>         bool "Profiling support (EXPERIMENTAL)"
>         help
>           Say Y here to enable the extended profiling support mechanisms used
>           by profilers such as OProfile.
>
>
> config OPROFILE
>         tristate "OProfile system profiling (EXPERIMENTAL)"
>         depends on PROFILING
>         help
>           OProfile is a profiling system capable of profiling the
>           whole system, include the kernel, kernel modules, libraries,
>           and applications.
>
>           If unsure, say N.
> ==============================
>
>   the above is a bit silly.  note that both prompts advertise
> themselves as "EXPERIMENTAL" even though neither of them has such a
> dependency.  they *are*, however, part of an submenu that *is*
> dependent on EXPERIMENTAL (although you'd never know that just by
> looking at that Kconfig file).  in short, it's just kind of ugly
> hackery at the moment.

Yes but pushing the EXPERIMENTAL check to individual menu members
shouldn't be done in a way which leads to an empty menu for any kernel
configuration. I suspect that this is why the EXPERIMENTAL check is on
the instrumentation menu in the first place.

>   my original point was simply that, based on its acceptance, it would
> seem kprobes has progressed beyond the EXPERIMENTAL phase, that's all.

It's worth a look on some archs.

--
Abhishek Sagar
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