On 06/17/2011 09:15 AM, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 08:23:01AM -0600, David Ahern wrote:

quoted

On 06/17/2011 08:14 AM, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:

quoted

So I feel uncomfortable with this tod_sample_type hack. I think we can't really continue
with this fixed sample_type per session given the kind of hacks that involves.

One thing we could do is to split session->sample_type into an array with one sample
type per event type (hardware, breakpoint, software, tracepoint).

And then each builtin tool can provide their constraints on top of these values:

- builtin-report wants sample_type[HARDWARE] == sample_type[SOFTWARE] == sample_type[TRACEPOINT] == sample_type[BREAKPOINT]
  although that may be tunable by the time but we can start with that.
- builtin-script has no specific constraints, except that sample_type[i] meets what the user passed as a parameter
- etc..

Constraints can probably default to sample_type[i] == sample_type[i+1] to mimic the current behaviour. Then tools
can override that.

What do you think?

I started working on sample_type refactoring right after sending this
patchset (though I got sidetracked). Each evsel in the list has a
perf_attr struct which has a sample_type. Why not use that which allows
events to have their own sample type - versus a type per event type?

This can make sense, I can figure out some cases where such granularity can be
useful. Branch recording doesn't care about recording period for example I think.

quoted

I'll see if I can get back to it in the next few days and get a better
idea of the pain involved with the refactoring.

Thanks a lot :)

Coming back to this one ....

From what I can see sample_type has to be a global per perf session and
all samples have to use the same sample_type or a change is needed to
the API/ABI.

The perf_event_header does not have any information that uniquely
associates it with a specific event type. Right now
perf_evlist__id2evsel() is used to associate a sample with a specific
event (evsel) in the list, but that function requires a parsed sample.
To parse a sample we need the sample_type. So, the sample_type has to be
a global and the same for all samples.

David