Re: [PATCH] LTT for 2.5.38 1/9: Core infrastructure

[Ingo Molnar]

a number of suggestions to make the tracer truly lightweight:

 - remove the 'event registration' and callback stuff. It just introduces
   unnecessery runtime overhead. Use an include file as a registry of
   events instead. This will simplify things greatly. Why do you need a
   table of callbacks registered to an event? Nothing in your patches
   actually uses it ... Just use one tracing function that copies the
   arguments into a per-CPU ringbuffer. It's really just a few lines.

 - do not disable interrupts when writing events. I used this method in
   a tracer and it works well. Just get an irq-safe index to the trace
   ring-buffer and fill it in. [eg. on x86 incl can be used for this
   purpose.]

 - get rid of p->trace_info and the pending_write_count - it's completely
   unnecessery.

 - drivers/trace/tracer.c is a complex mess of strange coding style and
   #ifdefs, it's not proper Linux kernel code.

it's possible to have lightweight tracing - this patch clearly is not
achieving that goal yet.

	Ingo