On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:17:44 -0500
Mathieu Desnoyers [off-list ref] wrote:

On 2023-12-09 22:54, Steven Rostedt wrote:
[...]

quoted

Basically, events to the tracing subsystem are limited to just under a
PAGE_SIZE, as the ring buffer is split into "sub buffers" of one page
size, and an event can not be bigger than a sub buffer. This allows users
to change the size of a sub buffer by the order:

   echo 3 > /sys/kernel/tracing/buffer_subbuf_order

Will make each sub buffer a size of 8 pages, allowing events to be almost
as big as 8 pages in size (sub buffers do have meta data on them as
well, keeping an event from reaching the same size as a sub buffer).  

Specifying the "order" of subbuffer size as a power of two of
number of pages is a poor UX choice for a user-facing ABI.

I would recommend allowing the user to specify the size in bytes, and
internally bump to size to the next power of 2, with a minimum of
PAGE_SIZE.

Thanks. I actually agree with you and thought about doing just that, but
decided to not make those changes and send out these patches with the
given API first. I wanted to see if you would comment on this ;-) You did
not disappoint!

I was thinking of keeping the same kind of interface as we have with the
buffer size "buffer_size_kb", and have it be "buffer_subbuf_size_kb", where
you specify the minimum size in kilobytes and it creates it, and the subbuf
may end up being bigger than specified (as that's more a implementation
detail).

Now that you called it out, I will add a patch to convert that as such. But
will keep the current patches in for historical reasons.

-- Steve