Subject: Re: [PATCH] softlockup: detect bottom-half lockups

From: Mandeep Singh Baines <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:04:55 -0800

Stumbled upon ftrace tracepoints while writing this patch. Should
make life a lot easier for debugging latency issues.

bhlockup should complement ftrace. Once you've found that there's a
problem, tracing can be a big help in debugging. But assertions are
nice for finding problems you didn't know exist.

Ingo Molnar ([email-masked]) wrote:
> 
> * Mandeep Singh Baines <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> > The feature should be useful to real-time developers and developers of 
> > network and other high-performance drivers.
> 
> hm, did you know about the ftrace latency tracers:
> 
>  config IRQSOFF_TRACER
>          bool "Interrupts-off Latency Tracer"
> 
>  config PREEMPT_TRACER
>          bool "Preemption-off Latency Tracer"
> 
>  config SCHED_TRACER
>          bool "Scheduling Latency Tracer"
> 
> PREEMPT_TRACER would have shown you that softirqs-off section very nicely. 
> 
> (And if you also enable the function tracer then not just the latency 
> endpoint is shown, but also all the function calls that happened in the 
> critical section.)
> 
> 	Ingo