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  • Peter Zijlstra (Intel)'s avatar
    perf: Avoid horrible stack usage · 86038c5e
    Peter Zijlstra (Intel) authored
    
    
    Both Linus (most recent) and Steve (a while ago) reported that perf
    related callbacks have massive stack bloat.
    
    The problem is that software events need a pt_regs in order to
    properly report the event location and unwind stack. And because we
    could not assume one was present we allocated one on stack and filled
    it with minimal bits required for operation.
    
    Now, pt_regs is quite large, so this is undesirable. Furthermore it
    turns out that most sites actually have a pt_regs pointer available,
    making this even more onerous, as the stack space is pointless waste.
    
    This patch addresses the problem by observing that software events
    have well defined nesting semantics, therefore we can use static
    per-cpu storage instead of on-stack.
    
    Linus made the further observation that all but the scheduler callers
    of perf_sw_event() have a pt_regs available, so we change the regular
    perf_sw_event() to require a valid pt_regs (where it used to be
    optional) and add perf_sw_event_sched() for the scheduler.
    
    We have a scheduler specific call instead of a more generic _noregs()
    like construct because we can assume non-recursion from the scheduler
    and thereby simplify the code further (_noregs would have to put the
    recursion context call inline in order to assertain which __perf_regs
    element to use).
    
    One last note on the implementation of perf_trace_buf_prepare(); we
    allow .regs = NULL for those cases where we already have a pt_regs
    pointer available and do not need another.
    
    Reported-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    Reported-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
    Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@kernel.org>
    Cc: Javi Merino <javi.merino@arm.com>
    Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
    Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
    Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
    Cc: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.cz>
    Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
    Cc: Tom Zanussi <tom.zanussi@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Vaibhav Nagarnaik <vnagarnaik@google.com>
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20141216115041.GW3337@twins.programming.kicks-ass.net
    
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
    86038c5e