perf: Add ITRACE_START record to indicate that tracing has started

For counters that generate AUX data that is bound to the context of a
running task, such as instruction tracing, the decoder needs to know
exactly which task is running when the event is first scheduled in,
before the first sched_switch. The decoder's need to know this stems
from the fact that instruction flow trace decoding will almost always
require program's object code in order to reconstruct said flow and
for that we need at least its pid/tid in the perf stream.

To single out such instruction tracing pmus, this patch introduces
ITRACE PMU capability. The reason this is not part of RECORD_AUX
record is that not all pmus capable of generating AUX data need this,
and the opposite is *probably* also true.

While sched_switch covers for most cases, there are two problems with it:
the consumer will need to process events out of order (that is, having
found RECORD_AUX, it will have to skip forward to the nearest sched_switch
to figure out which task it was, then go back to the actual trace to
decode it) and it completely misses the case when the tracing is enabled
and disabled before sched_switch, for example, via PERF_EVENT_IOC_DISABLE.

Signed-off-by: Alexander Shishkin <alexander.shishkin@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Kaixu Xia <kaixu.xia@linaro.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Robert Richter <rric@kernel.org>
Cc: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: acme@infradead.org
Cc: adrian.hunter@intel.com
Cc: kan.liang@intel.com
Cc: markus.t.metzger@intel.com
Cc: mathieu.poirier@linaro.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1421237903-181015-15-git-send-email-alexander.shishkin@linux.intel.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 11 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/uapi/linux/perf_event.h b/include/uapi/linux/perf_event.h
index 84819546c8ce..309211b3eb67 100644
--- a/include/uapi/linux/perf_event.h
+++ b/include/uapi/linux/perf_event.h
@@ -789,6 +789,17 @@ enum perf_event_type {
 	 */
 	PERF_RECORD_AUX				= 11,
 
+	/*
+	 * Indicates that instruction trace has started
+	 *
+	 * struct {
+	 *	struct perf_event_header	header;
+	 *	u32				pid;
+	 *	u32				tid;
+	 * };
+	 */
+	PERF_RECORD_ITRACE_START		= 12,
+
 	PERF_RECORD_MAX,			/* non-ABI */
 };